"
With his advance to the crown James's graciousness had increased. He
kept great lords waiting without while he conversed at leisure with the
Quaker. He liked Penn, and Penn liked him. In spite of the disparities
in their age, rank, and creed, William Penn and James Stuart were fast
friends, united by the bond of genuine affection.

It was characteristic of Penn to be blind to the faults of his friends.
He brought great troubles both upon himself and upon his colony by his
refusal to believe the reports which were made to him against the
character of men whom he had appointed to office: he was unwilling to
believe evil of any man. He fell into bankruptcy, and even into a
debtor's prison, by his blind, unquestioning confidence in the agent who
managed his business. His faith in James was of a piece with his whole
character. He appears to have been temperamentally incapable of
perceiving the unworthiness of anybody whom he liked.

Together with this conviction as to the king's honesty, and bound up
with it, was a like belief in the wisdom of the king's plan. The king's
plan was to remove all disabilities arising from religion. He purposed
not only to put an end to the laws under which honest men were kept in
prison, but to abolish the "tests" which prevented a Roman Catholic from
holding office. And, without tarrying for the action of a cautious
Parliament, his intention was to do these things at once by a
declaration of the royal will. All this was approved by William Penn.

That the laws which disturbed Protestant dissenters should be changed,
he argued at length in a pamphlet entitled "A Persuasion to Moderation."
Moderation, as he defined it, meant "liberty of conscience to church
dissenters;" a cause which, with all humility, he said, he had
undertaken to plead against the prejudices of the times. He maintained
that toleration was not only a right inherent in religion, but that it
was for the political and commercial good of the nation. Repression and
persecution, he said, drive men into conspiracies. The importing of
religious distinctions into the affairs of state deprives the country of
the services of some of its best men. His father, upon the occasion of
the first Dutch war, had submitted to the king a list of the ablest sea
officers in the kingdom. The striking of the names of nonconformists
from this list had "robbed the king at that time of ten men, whose
greater knowledge and valour, than any other ten of