USA > Pennsylvania > The making of Pennsylvania; an analysis of the elements of the population and the formative influences that created one of the greatest of the American states > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25
31
The Making of Pennsylvania
So far as Pennsylvania was concerned, there was little for the duke's laws to act upon, save rocks and trees. They are utterly inconsistent with the real laws of Penn- sylvania enacted by Penn and the Quakers. They made the town the unit of division, after the manner of the New England system, from which they were largely copied. Penn made the county the unit of division. Afterwards the township and borough were added, and the Pennsylvania system became a combination of town and county government unknown in other communities. The duke's laws provided, among other things, for nine offences to be punished with death, among which were heresy, perjury, kidnapping, and smiting of parents. The Quaker laws established religious liberty, and made only murder punishable with death. The duke's laws also provided for an elaborate system of recruiting and dis- ciplining the militia. The Quakers refused to have a militia, and none was adopted until shortly before the Revolution.
The Swedes, the Dutch, and the English under the duke made no important settlement, so far as Pennsyl- vania was concerned, and did nothing which materially affected after events. Their peculiar laws and customs soon became completely obsolete; they and their de- scendants were absorbed in the rest of the population ; and there is no institution in Pennsylvania that can be traced to their influence. They were not in the line of the real beginning and progress of our Commonwealth. That Commonwealth was created by the Quakers, and to them must be given our more serious attention .*
* Hazard's Annals; Proud's Pennsylvania; Acrelius' New Sweden; The Duke of Yorke's Book of Laws; Sprinchorn's New Sweden.
32
CHAPTER II.
ORIGIN OF THE QUAKERS.
IN histories of Pennsylvania the religious traits of her founders have usually been omitted entirely or disposed of in short notes in an appendix. Instead of that we should follow the order which actually occurred in which those traits formed the beginning and the foundation. The men who founded Pennsylvania, like those who founded most of the other colonies, were intensely relig- ious ; they came here because of religion ; and they lived in a time when religious doctrines were the great and absorbing questions and were discussed with an inten- sity we can hardly realize. For several centuries before Pennsylvania was founded the people of Europe had been fighting, burning, and imprisoning each other about religion.
The sects of that time were distinct from one another. There was but little of that general resemblance which we now see. They were kept separate by persecution and their fierce contentions. Most of them could be recognized at once by their dress and manner. They gave to each colony they founded in America a marked individuality, which is now to a great extent lost. The citizens of our different States no longer reveal their origin at a glance. Their distinguishing characteristics become evident only on close observation. The man from Massachusetts associates easily with the Virginian,
3
33
The Making of Pennsylvania
and we might have to look more than once before we could tell one from the other. But in colonial times we could have distinguished them in an instant, and in very early colonial times they would not have been congenial to each other. The solemn Puritan would have been shocked and the fox-hunting Virginian would have been bored.
The Pennsylvania Quaker was of still another type Formal and stiff like the Puritan, he had, however, none of the Puritan sternness and severity. He believed in religious liberty, while the Puritan denied it. Bound down by rules of conduct as strict and narrow as any that the Puritan invented, he was, nevertheless, most liberal in his opinions and far ahead of the Puritan in philanthropy and all the most advanced ideas of the modern world. The Puritan was opposed to high living and the pleasures of the table, but was devoted to learning and literature. The Quaker, on the other hand, despised learning, poetry, music, and the fine arts as vicious amusements; but he seems to have had no rule or custom which prohibited very good living and a very liberal hospitality. During the early days of the Revolution, when the members of the Continental Con- gress were in Philadelphia, they were entertained in Quaker families in a way that astonished them, especially those from New England.
In order to see how the movement of the Reformation finally resulted in the Quakers and the Pennsylvania Dutch, we must rid our minds of the notion, which is so prevalent, that the Reformation was the work of one or two men, and that it occurred within a short space of time. It was really a reactionary drift or tendency, not
34
Origin of the Quakers
an organized movement, and it is impossible to assign dates to it. No one knows exactly when it began, nor has it yet ceased its action. Nothing could be more absurd than to suppose that Luther was its author. He was simply a leader among the Germans, as Calvin was among the French and Swiss, and, being a picturesque, vehement character, he has attracted to himself more attention than the others. About the year 1400, almost a hundred years before Luther was born, John Huss had preached the need of a reformation in Bohemia, and gathered quite a following; and half a century before that Wycliffe had preached it in England. The period of the Roman Empire is gone, and the Middle Age is gone; but we are hardly yet out of the period of the Reformation. We are still acted upon by its influences, and they will, in all probability, be with us for many years to come.
1318874
The Reformation, regarded as a period of evolution, may be looked at from many points of view. We may consider its development of morals, its development of the arts and conveniences of life, or its development of free government and republicanism; but the thread which we must briefly follow down to the Quakers is a purely religious one, namely, the development and decline of dogmatism.
It is hardly necessary to give the well-known details of the growth of dogmas in the Christian Church during the Middle Ages. From the fourth century the devel- opment went steadily on, and the ecclesiastics, with in- creasing power and increasing ingenuity, wove mesh by mesh a net-work over the human mind. In the fourth century the Bishop of Rome began to claim chief au-
35
The Making of Pennsylvania
thority and show signs of developing into what is now the Pope. But infallibility was not claimed for him until the eleventh century, and not finally asserted until within our own time in the middle of the nineteenth. Mariolatry, or the worship of the Virgin, began about the year 400 and steadily increased. Image worship, which for many hundred years had been regarded as a heresy, began to be allowed in the seventh century, and after that developed to great excesses. Up to the twelfth century there were only two sacraments. After that there were seven. And so the dogmas increased, and miracles multiplied, and relics of saints appeared from every quarter, and all these things must be accepted and believed, until about the twelfth century there was a climax or congestion. The founding of the Inquisition in 1248 marks the time when the system had reached its height, for the Inquisition was absolutely necessary to hold the mass together and prevent reaction.
But the mass had become so great that it soon began to crumble of its own weight. The revival of the ancient learning of Greece and Rome and the invention of the printing-press assisted the inevitable day, and, as the people of Europe one by one began to realize their con- ! dition, the reaction was terrible. Men whose minds had for generations been in submission to authority, men who had for generations been accustomed to but the one idea of dogma, dogma, infallible dogma, and who had never dared to think for themselves, were shaken loose from their hold. They were free, and went about seeking rest. There was great wandering, disagreement, and searching of heart ; and that was the Reformation.
The first point to observe in this reaction, the point
36
1
Origin of the Quakers
which concerns us in the history of Pennsylvania, is that men revolted against dogma by slow degrees. Wyc- liffe, the first great leader of the Reformation, could rid himself of only one dogma. He rejected transubstan- tiation and kept pretty much all the rest. John Huss, the next great leader, attacked at first only the fraudu- lent miracles of the ecclesiastics. Luther, who appeared a hundred years after Huss, was equally conservative. His famous ninety-five propositions were aimed only at the sale of indulgences, which at that time was carried to great excess.
Leaving the leaders, and taking up the various sects as they appear one after the other, we find the same slow movement. But there is this fact to be observed: the small and badly organized sects were always more pro- gressive than the larger and stronger ones. Three or four hundred years ago there was a large number of these small sects, playing an important part in history, and now forgotten. Familists, Seekers, Ranters, Pie- tists, Antinomians, Anti-Scripturists, Enthusiasts, Soul Sleepers, Levellers, Adamites, Traskites, and Anabap- tists are some of the names which were very familiar to the men of those days and now have to be looked for in dictionaries.
The great and strongly organized divisions of Chris- tendom were comparatively conservative. The Church of England reformed itself from within, without changing its historic character ; others which became prominent in the Reformation-the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, and the Independents-gave up some dogmas, but clung to others with great determination. They advanced care- fully, and only a few steps, into liberty. Composed
37
The Making of Pennsylvania
largely of the middle and upper classes, they shrank from the unsettling effects of radicalism, the disturbance to law and order and the rights of property. It was dis- covered early in the Reformation that property rights were closely entangled with the old religious thought. Luther saw this very clearly, and after the horrors of the peasants' war in Germany he became more conserva- tive than ever.
But the numerous small sects were composed of men of the lower classes, who had nothing to lose by a change, and were unprejudiced by education. Many of them disposed of the whole dogmatic system with one stroke of their minds and relied entirely on their own thought and feeling; and reliance on individual con- science and judgment was the test of advancement in the Reformation. Some of these advanced within a year to a position which the great conservative denominations have only lately reached. They were the explorers and scouts, and, like all such adventurers, were far in front of the main army, and too few to be much respected by the enemy.
The main principles of pretty much all of them in- cluded the abrogation of the Old Testament, a denial of the necessity of forms, ceremonies, sacraments, and. church government, and a reliance on contemplation and individual feeling and experience as the final au- thority in religion. These ideas nourished and supported for many years the Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and others; and when these weak and badly-organized sects disappeared, the same ideas went to make up the stronger and more intelligent and practical Quakers.
Many of the early Baptists, both in England and Ger-
38
Origin of the Quakers
many, were very much like the Quakers. They were opposed to a hireling ministry; they held that the church should be composed of equals; that the ordi- nances of the Old Testament were abolished; that the pagan names for months and days were unchristian, and they allowed women to preach. In fact, all these small and radical sects which we have mentioned, Familists, Antinomians, Seekers, Anabaptists, and others, were finally in England swallowed up in two large ones, the Baptists and the Quakers. In Germany they were ab- sorbed by the Mennonites, Tunkers, and other people, many of whom came to Pennsylvania.
The Familistic and Antinomian sects could not last long. They were rather vague in their principles and almost entirely without organization. They maintained an uncertain existence for some years, until the feeling and motives which had caused their growth were satis- fied in sects which were of a better class in life, retained just enough conservatism to steady them, and were able to have a more practical and enduring form of govern- ment.
The Baptists paid a little compliment to the past by accepting a few of the old dogmas in a modified form, and some of them were believers in predestination and election. They preceded the Quakers by only a few years. The other great divisions of the Reformation, the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and others, all took their rise at a comparatively early period. But the Quakers showed no sign of any distinctive or- ganization until about a hundred years afterwards ; and the year 1650 is a convenient time from which to date their beginning.
39
The Making of Pennsylvania
They went far beyond the Baptists : rejected baptism altogether, and denied the necessity of any sacraments. The Reformation movement gradually led up step by step to the Quakers, who represented the extremest ideas of aversion to dogma ; and they might be described as the high-water mark of the reaction. It would have been difficult to go farther. In fact, like many other radicals, the Quakers went so far that, as we shall see later on, they were compelled to take a few backward steps.
40
CHAPTER III.
QUAKER TRAITS.
THE doctrines of the Quakers were very peculiar and interesting. But we should make a great mistake if we described their doctrines and allowed that to stand as a picture of the people. The same might be said of other religions. It would be unfair to judge of the Roman Catholics of to-day by supposing that they still believed the literal statement of the doctrine of persecution which their Church adopted six hundred years ago. If we
should read Jonathan Edwards' descriptions of the doctrines of Calvinism without having ever seen a Calvinist, we might suppose him to be a very different person from what he really is. If in the same way we should read of Quaker doctrine, we might expect to find the people an abstract essence of spirituality without enough of human nature left to stir the dust. Fortu- nately for the world, men do not always live up close to their creeds.
Excellent books have been written about the Quakers. Clarkson's Portraiture and Janney's History of them are both very complete in their way. But they describe the theoretical Quaker. The actual one was somewhat dif- ferent, and was a product of the doctrines mollified, some- times in a very unexpected way, by human passions.
This mollifying was very apparent in the Pennsylvania Quakers. In most countries they were a very retired
41
The Making of Pennsylvania
sect. In England they were made up chiefly from the rural population. They were opposed to war, official oaths, and politics, and had no difficulty in living up to these notions. But in Pennsylvania they were the gov- erning body, responsible for the political management of the country. Instead of avoiding politics, as too exciting for religious contemplation, they were compelled to take a very active part in them. They attempted to conduct their government without oaths, but were not entirely successful. They also attempted to conduct it without war or force, and in that they utterly failed. Their ablest men, like Logan and Dickinson, openly favored defen- sive war, and Dickinson carried a musket as a common soldier and was also a colonel in the Revolution.
Hundreds of others, when the temptation was strong upon them, enlisted in the army. Still larger numbers invented excuses to their consciences for indirectly sup- porting, by votes of supplies, or otherwise, the warlike measures which became absolutely necessary. When struck or insulted, they could not help retaliating, al- though they might afterwards write a letter to the meet- ing saying that they were sorry, or that they had in- tended only to lay their hands gently on their adversary. When they became magistrates, or sheriffs, or officials, they arrested and punished wrong-doers, although such action necessarily involved the use of force and violence. For two hundred years the world has been full of hu- morous stories to show how the Quaker remained human in spite of his doctrines. The Quaker who tossed a pirate overboard, saying, "Friend, thee has no business here," and the other one who cut the rope by which the intruder was climbing aboard, saying, " Friend, thee may
42
Quaker Traits
have that," are fair samples of many others. A large part of the history of Pennsylvania is made up of at- tempts to coax or drive the Quakers into war, and their partial success.
The possession of power, the consciousness of hav- ing conducted a wonderfully successful colony, and the growth of wealth gave to them, in the height of their ascendency, about the time of the Revolution, a strong tincture of worldly honor and pride which their doctrines seemed to scorn. Judging by what we can read of them at this time, many of them were not without a certain amount of haughtiness and arrogance. They were by no means slow or retiring ; on the contrary, they played a very active, earnest, and prominent part in all affairs of life, political, commercial, and social.
All these characteristics have of course now disap- peared, and it is difficult to realize that they ever ex- isted. The real Quaker, as he lived and moved in Pennsylvania, appears from time to time with more or less distinctness as we read the history of the State. But still it is necessary to have a clear idea of his theories, of what he might have been if he had lived his doctrines logically.
The fundamental principle of the Quakers was what they called the universal light, or the inward light. It was a feeling, they said, given to every man born into the world, and was sufficient to guide him to all relig- ious truth and save his soul. It was not to be con- founded with conscience, which was an original faculty of human nature, and existed in perfection in Adam and Eve before the fall. The inner light had been given by the Founder of Christianity, and, instead of being identical
43
The Making of Pennsylvania
with conscience, its purpose was to enlighten conscience. It came to every individual on earth, heathen as well as Christian. The only limitation was that the heathen had the light but slightly, not so thoroughly as those races and nations called Christian.
The Quaker method of cultivating the inward light was by silence and meditation. They believed that by sitting still and fixing their thoughts on God they brought themselves into relation with Him. This still- ness constitutes a large part of their worship. They sit silent in their meeting-houses ; not a word, or prayer, or sermon is heard until the spirit moves some one to speak; and it is not at all uncommon for these meetings to be held in perfect silence from beginning to end.
The belief that silent contemplation can develop rela- tionship with God is very old, and is usually known in history by the name quietism. It has always formed a conspicuous part of the religions of India and China, and has prevailed to a greater or less extent among Chris- tians. Extreme quietism, the quietism cultivated in the East, consists in a complete resignation of oneself into passiveness, into a state of mental inactivity without thought, reflection, hope, or wish; a state in which all external objects and ambitions are lost to sight, and the person withdraws into his inmost self. By this means, it is said, the soul is gradually brought into the divine presence until an actual union is effected, and man be- comes absorbed in the infinite. It is easy to see that meditation of this kind, if continually practised, will gradually weaken the intellect, and quietism may become mental sleep and religion a mere dream.
44
Quaker Traits
Although many sects of Christianity have had more or less mysticism or quietism, there have probably never been any Christians who indulged in extreme quietism. The most pronounced Christian mystics have never maintained that we should give up all mental activity. But it is important to notice that as men advance in quietism they lose all hold on dogmas and sacraments. There undoubtedly have been Christian mystics who professed and tried to hold orthodox dogmas; but they regarded the dogmas as experiences to be realized rather than propositions to be believed. Quietism demands abstraction from all externals, and when the quietist state of mind is once attained dogmas and sacraments become useless.
The movement of thought which produced the Quakers in England about the year 1650 sent a wave of quietism all over Europe. It showed itself in the Church of Rome in 1675, when Molinos, the Quietist, led the movement with such success that the Pope became a convert, and the spread of it had to be stopped by the inquisition.
Molinos was a Spanish priest, who, after gaining some distinction in his own country, came to Rome to advance his ideas. He taught that men should seek God first by meditation, in which the doubts that troubled the soul were struggled with and subdued one by one. The second stage was contemplation, in which the soul ceased to struggle, no longer reasoned or reflected, but contem- plated God in silence and repose. By this inaction the soul annihilated itself, returned to its beginning, which is the divine essence, and lost itself in God. This method, which he called the interior way, was, he said, the true
45
The Making of Pennsylvania
growth of the soul by which it rose far beyond the need of all sacraments and ceremonies. He taught the people to go straight to God without the aid of priests, confes- sionals, beads, or images.
The formal statement of his doctrine can be found in his book ; but his personal and practical application of it must have been much more effective. All who came in contact with him were trained in the art of contemplation and quietude, and were delighted with it. Their numbers and zeal prove his skill as a spiritual director. Like the Quakers, he believed in serenity, was opposed to all ex- citements, festivals, anniversaries, or anything that inter- fered with tranquillity, and he also resembled them in holding that by the interior way human nature could become perfect. Like the Quakers, he attempted to vitalize religion by returning to the first principles of consciousness. He attempted to develop the pure spirit by pure meditation.
The shattered condition of the Roman Church in the times of the Reformation is nowhere more clearly shown than in his success. His book, "The Spiritual Guide," was translated into several languages, and within six years passed through twenty editions. He was on the point of being made a cardinal, and it was heresy to differ from him. In Naples alone he was reported to have had twenty thousand converts. Multitudes flocked to him, or sought his advice by letter. It looked as if the Roman Church was about to turn Quaker.
His system kept spreading and increasing in power for nearly twenty years, and none but the Jesuits saw the danger of it. The idea, it is true, was not a new one. St. Bonaventura, St. Theresa, John of the Cross, and
46
Quaker Traits
many others had not only written books on quietism, which had been approved by authority, but they had openly practised the doctrine, and had been commended for it. They practised it, however, in obedience to the ordinary rules of the Church, and they continued to pro- fess their belief in the ordinary dogmas. The Church was willing to allow them an enthusiasm or a singular- ity, provided they would form themselves into an order and yield implicit obedience.
But Molinos and his followers were altogether outside of any rule or obedience. They held that every man's religion was contained within himself, and that quietism was the universal path to God. They carried their belief to its logical conclusion, and made no pretence of hold- ing dogmas utterly inconsistent with it. They were not establishing an order with a discipline applicable only to those who should join it, but they were establishing a system to embrace all mankind. If their efforts had con- tinued a few years longer the Church of the Middle Ages would have disappeared from the face of the earth, and Molinos would have been a greater man than either Luther or Calvin.
But the Jesuits, whose order had been founded for the express purpose of counteracting the effects of the Reformation, were untiring in their labors, and finally turned the tide. When it became evident that the people everywhere were becoming indifferent to masses, relics, rosaries, confessionals, and the other means by which the Church maintained her dominion, the Jesuits had an unanswerable argument. The inquisition was turned upon the heresy. Two hundred of the leaders, including Molinos, were instantly imprisoned, and such
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.