the prisoners to North Holland, where they were set
at liberty. The condition of the jails in the city, where were large
numbers of Quakers, was dreadful in the extreme. Ill ventilated,
crowded, and loathsome with the accumulated filth of centuries, they
invited the disease which daily decimated their cells. "Go on!" says
Pennington, writing to the King and bishops from his plague-infected cell
in the Aylesbury prison: "try it out with the Spirit of the Lord! Come
forth with your laws, and prisons, and spoiling of goods, and banishment,
and death, if the Lord please, and see if ye can carry it! Whom the Lord
loveth He can save at His pleasure. Hath He begun to break our bonds and
deliver us, and shall we now distrust Him? Are we in a worse condition
than Israel was when the sea was before them, the mountains on either
side, and the Egyptians behind, pursuing them?"

Brave men and faithful! It is not necessary that the present generation,
how quietly reaping the fruit of your heroic endurance, should see eye to
eye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order to
recognize your claim to gratitude and admiration. For, in an age of
hypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with noble
exceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints were
taking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outside
show of conformity, for the sake of place or pardon, ye maintained the
austere dignity of virtue, and, with King and Church and Parliament
arrayed against you, vindicated the Rights of Conscience, at the cost of
home, fortune, and life. English liberty owes more to your unyielding
firmness than to the blows stricken for her at Worcester and Naseby.

In 1667, we find the Latin teacher in attendance at a great meeting of
Friends, in London, convened at the suggestion of George Fox, for the
purpose of settling a little difficulty which had arisen among the
Friends, even under the pressure of the severest persecution, relative to
the very important matter of "wearing the hat." George Fox, in his love
of truth and sincerity in word and action, had discountenanced the
fashionable doffing of the hat, and other flattering obeisances towards
men holding stations in Church or State, as savoring of man-worship,
giving to the creature the reverence only due to the Creator, as
undignified and wanting in due self-respect, and tending to support
unnatural and oppressive distin