, of American colonization. With
admirable business shrewdness combined with courtly tact, he canceled an
otherwise hopeless debt from the crown in consideration of the
concession to him of a domain of imperial wealth and dimensions, with
practically unlimited rights of jurisdiction. At once he put into
exercise the advantages and opportunities which were united in him so as
never before in the promoter of a like enterprise, and achieved a
success speedy and splendid beyond all precedent.

The providential preparations for this great enterprise--"the Holy
Experiment," as Penn delighted to call it--had been visibly in progress
in England for not more than the third part of a century. It was not the
less divine for being wholly logical and natural, that, just when the
Puritan Reformation culminated in the victory of the Commonwealth, the
Quaker Reformation should suddenly break forth. Puritanism was the last
expression of that appeal from the church to the Scriptures, from
existing traditions of Christianity to its authentic original documents,
which is the essence of Protestantism. In Puritanism, reverence for the
Scriptures is exaggerated to the point of superstition. The doctrine
that God of old had spoken by holy men was supplemented by the
pretension that God had long ago ceased so to speak and never would so
speak again. The claim that the Scriptures contain a sufficient guide to
moral duty and religious truth was exorbitantly stretched to include the
last details of church organization and worship, and the minute
direction of political and other secular affairs. In many a case the
Scriptures thus applied did highly ennoble the polity and legislation of
the Puritans.[113:1] In other cases, not a few, the Scriptures,
perverted from their true purpose and wrested by a vicious and conceited
exegesis, were brought into collision with the law written on the heart.
The Bible was used to contradict the moral sense. It was high time for
the Quaker protest, and it was inevitable that this protest should be
extravagant and violent.

In their bold reassertion of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, that his
light "lighteth every man who cometh into the world," it is not strange
that the first Quakers should sometimes have lost sight of those
principles the enunciation of which gives such a character of sober
sanity to the apostolic teachings on this subject--that a divine
influence on the mind does not discharge one from the duty