ays that Vincent was
"transported with fiery zeal;" which, as he remarks in parenthesis, is
"a thing fertile of ill language." Penn challenged him to a public
debate; and, this not giving the Quaker champion an opportunity to say
all that was in his mind, he wrote a pamphlet, called "The Sandy
Foundation Shaken." The full title was much longer than this, in the
manner of the time, and announced the author's purpose to refute three
"generally believed and applauded doctrines: first, of one God,
subsisting in three distinct and separate persons; second, of the
impossibility of divine pardon without the making of a complete
satisfaction; and third, of the justification of impure persons by an
imputed righteousness."

Penn's handling of the doctrine of the Trinity in this treatise gave
much offense. He had taken the position of his fellow-religionists, that
the learning of the schools was a hindrance to religion. He sought to
divest the great statements of the creed from the subtleties of mediaeval
philosophy. He purposed to return to the Scripture itself, back of all
councils and formulas. Asserting, accordingly, the being and unity of
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, he so refused all the conventional phrases
of the theologians as to seem to them to reject the doctrine of the
Trinity itself. He did deny "the trinity of distinct and separate
persons in the unity of essence." If the word "person" has one meaning,
Penn was right; if it has another meaning, he was wrong. If a "person"
is an individual, then the assertion is that there are three Gods; but
if the word signifies a distinction in the divine nature, then the unity
of God remains. As so often happens in doctrinal contention, he and his
critics used the same words with different definitions. The consequence
was that the bishop of London had him put in prison. He was restrained
for seven months in the Tower.

The English prison of the seventeenth century was a place of disease of
body and misery of mind. Penn was kept in close confinement, and the
bishop sent him word that he must either recant or die a prisoner. "I
told him," says Penn, "that the Tower was the worst argument in the
world to convince me; for whoever was in the wrong, those who used force
for religion could never be in the right." He declared that his prison
should be his grave before he would budge a jot. Thus six months passed.

But the situation was intolerable. It is sometimes necessary to die for