to be turned to account when he had some favor to ask, through the queen, for himself and his fellow-sectaries.

For a man who made the highest professions of humanity, Penn seems to have had a remarkable taste for witnessing executions. One day he hurried from Cheapside, where he had seen Alderman Cornish hanged, drawn, and quartered, to Tyburn, where Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive, for aiding the escape of a man accused of treason, who came back, and for money turned informer against her. These were among the foulest judicial murders which disgraced those black and bloody times. That night, Penn must have "supped full with horrors."

The object which was ever uppermost in the heart of the perjured bigot, James II., was the overthrow of the Church of England, and the reëstablishment of popery. He steadily pur sued this object by a course of policy compounded of dark and crooked intrigues, interwoven with open violations of the constitution and laws of England, which he had sworn to maintain. Among these intrigues, he had a plan for obtaining the coöperation. of all classes of Protestant dissenters from the established church. By a coalition between Dissenters and Papists, he hoped to put the latter into a situation to overthrow the church by law established; and then to crush the Dissenters in their turn. Great efforts were made to corrupt the leading men in the various Dissenting interests, some of whom were induced to fall in with the wishes of the king, though with the loss of nearly all their influence with their old friends. The Dissenters, in general, saw through the trap, and scorned the tempting bait. For bringing the Congregationalists into the royal snare, the chief reliance was placed on Stephen Lobb, one of their ministers. This man, from having been a rabid opposer of the government, became a supple and servile tool for its purposes. Says Macaulay: "With Lobb was closely connected William Penn. Penn had never been a strong-headed man; the life which he had been leading during two years had not a little impaired his moral sensibility; and if his conscience ever reproached him, he comforted himself by repeating that he had a good and noble end in view, and that he was not paid for his services in money." In the oil of this Jesuitical morality, he soaked his conscience, till it arrived to all the pliability needful to make it a convenient instrument for the twisted policies of the king. 20 *

VOL. III.

In gaining over the Baptists, attempts were made to secure the aid of John Bunyan, and William Kiffin. Bunyan, who died about that time, almost with his latest breath abjured the scheme. Kiffin was a wealthy London merchant, and a preacher. He was a man of the highest probity, and possessed great weight of character. He was old, and broken-hearted at the loss of his two stripling grandsons, who had been ruthlessly slaughtered at the shambles of Jeffries. Here, too, Penn was set to work; and tried to wheedle the stern and incorruptible old saint, by the promise of an alderman's gown! But neither the minion nor his master could make the worthy Kiffin swerve from his fidelity.

The tyrant, disappointed of the aid he expected to obtain by purchasing the Dissenters, went a shorter way to work. He began to dismiss Protestants from his counsels and employments, and to violate the whole law of the land by thrusting Papists into the chief places in church and state. Even Penn, notwithstanding his purblind subserviency to the royal will and pleasure, began to discern that the king was driving toward his object too fast for safety. He began to suggest "equivalents," (a word which then first came into use among the English,) for pacifying the Protestants. One of Penn's proposed "equivalents" was, that the crown patronage should be divided into three equal parts, with one of which the Papists, who were not one in fifty of the population of the country, should content themselves. Preposterous as this "equivalent" would have been, it was made yet more absurd by the consideration, that there was no way provided to keep the king and his myrmidons satisfied with their extravagant share of the "spoils of office." So well pleased was James with the fawning sycophancy of this Friend, that when at Chester, on a royal ramble, he deigned to attend the Quaker meeting, and listen to a sermon from Penn's mellifluous tongue.

One of the king's most despotic outrages, was his attempt to force a papistical parasite into the presidency of Magdalene College, Oxford, contrary to the statutes of the founder, and the oaths of the members. The College resisted nobly and vigorously. The wrathful king even went to Oxford to coerce the refractory Fellows. Having tried threats and caresses in vain, he tried the arts of William Penn upon them. Penn ventured to remonstrate faintly against the violence and injustice of the king; but the king was obstinate, and "the courtly Quaker, therefore, did his best

to seduce the college from the path of right." First he tried to intimidate the sturdy Fellows. Then he counselled them at least to temporize. But when he found them stoutly resolved to obey conscience at all risks, he tried other courses. He called together a few of the leading members of the college, and after much smooth talk and professions of sympathy, held out the lure of a bishopric to the chief man among them, if they would succumb to the royal command. "Penn," says Macaulay, "had passed his life in declaiming against a hireling ministry. He held that he was bound to refuse the payment of tithes, and this even when he had bought land chargeable with tithes, and had been allowed the value of the tithes in the purchase-money. According to his own principles, he would have committed a great sin, if he had interfered for the purpose of obtaining a benefice on the most honorable terms for the most pious divine. Yet to such a degree had his manners been corrupted by evil communications, and his understanding obscured by inordinate zeal for a single object, that he did not scruple to become a broker in simony of a peculiarly discreditable kind, and to use a bishopric as a bait to tempt a divine to perjury." But all his lures were in vain; and his master had to effect his object by arraying the carbines of his cavalry. Penn was the subservient instrument of a popish and tyrannical prince in his efforts to prostrate the liberties, and Romanize the religion, of the country; and yet this "servant of all work," seems to have imagined "that nobody but himself had a conscience." How different his course from that of the inflexible Puritans, those staunch foes of despotism and popery!

It is not to be supposed, that Penn retained the confidence of the Quakers, while he was basking in the sunshine of royal favor; and while he was closeted with the king, when peers of the realm were for hours kept waiting for admission. "He was soon surrounded by flatterers and suppliants. His house at Kensington was sometimes thronged, at his hour of rising, by more than two hundred suitors." His own sect, meanwhile, grew shy of him; and many of them affirmed that he was secretly a Popish priest and a Jesuit. These groundless jealousies greatly abridged his popularity and influence with the zealous Friends.

There are other points, on which we meant to touch; but we must be content with one. Certain ignorant declaimers are in the habit of reproaching the settlers of New England for not

purchasing their lands of the Indians, as William Penn did his by the famous treaty at Philadelphia. Now the fact is beyond dispute, that our colonists, from the beginning, purchased all the territory they occupied. And if they paid but little for it, they paid all that it was worth at the time. The wilderness they bought had no pecuniary value but what was afterwards created by the industry of the purchasers. Fifty years before Penn landed on the shores of the Delaware, our fathers had made many treaties still extant, for the sale and cession of the lands they needed. This was a point on which they were particularly scrupulous.

Nor can it be pretended that Penn paid more liberally than our fathers for the rich territory he acquired; for his treaty has long been lost, and no man knows what was the value received by the savage owners. One part of the transaction has not a very honorable look. The ceded tract was not to be laid out by surveyors' theodolites, which are known among the Western tribes. as Colonel Fremont tells us, by the expressive name of "landstealers." The tract was to include as much space as a man could walk around in one day. Penn employed a long-limbed follower of his, who stilted it over the lot with such portentous strides, that the Indians grew surly, and feeling that they had literally been circumvented, refused to stand to the terms. Some who were with Penn, and who held that a bargain is a bargain, advised that they should be compelled to adhere to the contract. Nay, nay, quoth Penn, hurt not the poor creatures. Give them a few more yards of calico, or whatever toys sufficed to satisfy those children of nature. And yet this treaty is foolishly lauded as the first example of fair and righteous dealing in this line with the aborigines. Even Macaulay, who has little respect for Penn, says of him: "He will always be mentioned with honor as a founder of a colony, who did not in his dealings with a savage people, abuse the strength derived from civilization." We verily believe, that if this transaction had taken place in New England, it would have been commonly regarded as a Yankee trick, and as one of the smallest of the kind. And yet our fathers would have scorned such overreaching; and even if they had resented it somewhat harshly, we own that in such case we should feel more sympathy with the "Presbyterian sour," than with the "Quaker sly."

OBSERVATIONS ON MEN, BOOKS, AND THINGS.

POLEMICAL AND PRACTICAL RELIGION. - It is a singular happiness of Evangelical preachers, that, in the height of religious revival, and in the holiest fervors of their work, they are to urge the same doctrines which they maintain in the hour of controversy. On the awakened sinner, asking in anguish of soul, what he shall do to be saved, they press that Redeemer whose person unites the nature of God with ours, who allures our confidence by all that is human in his being, and assures it by all that is divine. Whether as controversialists or revivalists, they insist alike on the utter depravity and ruin of the sinner, on the necessity and sufficiency of the atoning sacrifice, and on the need of the grace of the Holy Spirit, as the personal Sanctifier and Comforter of the regenerate soul.

How different is the case with the advocates of Unitarianism! In controversy, they have contended for the mere humanity of Jesus ; and he is complimented with the title of Saviour, simply by reason of the salutary influence of his teaching and example. But is this statue of ice lifted up in the meeting for devotional purposes? Or do they not rather sigh for that life-warm faith which springs only from vital union with the Divine in Christ? What a damper it would be in such a scene, to go to speaking of Jesus as the very best and most exemplary of men!

So, too, in controversy, the Unitarians zealously vindicate human nature from the charge of depravity, and speak with enthusiasm, like Dr. Channing, of "adoring the divinity within us." Reason

is exalted to the sphere of the god-like; and man is made to save himself, so far as he needs salvation, by might and merit all his own. But will this strain answer for the conference-meeting? Or must they there bewail the ensnaring and enslaving power of sin, deplore their worldliness, coldness, and deadness of heart, and ask to "receive power from on high"? Would it not spoil the spirit of a praying circle, to go to extolling the nobleness of mankind, and the efficacy of human merit?

In doctrinal discussions, the Unitarians describe conversion on its human side, as the sinner's own act in the ordinary exercise of his natural faculties. The Holy Spirit has been spoken of as divine influence in general, and as not more specially concerned in the conversion of the sinner, than in any other event belonging to human affairs. But how instinctively is it felt that such views would be wholly out of place in the revival meeting! It would instantly quell the life of such an occasion, to speak of any thing but man's weakness and dependence, or to call in any aid but that of the life-giving Spirit of grace. It would not do, at such a time, to speak of deep concern for the salvation of the soul, of sudden conversion, and of overpowering religious joy, as being so many fanatical and hurtful excitements. When the Unitarians feel it necessary to make direct and united efforts to raise the tone of spiritual feeling among themselves, they are constrained to leave, at least in appearance, the ground they hold