the Puritans,
Protestants and many other now respectable sects were named.

Their founder and preachers were among the boldest and yet the meekest
of the non-conformists. Their morality was so strict that by some they
were denominated ascetics, and this strictness was carried into every
habit and department of life. Extravagant expenditures, fashionable
dress, games of chance, dancing, attending the theatres and all
amusements, however harmless, were forbidden by this sect. Even music
was discouraged as a seductive vanity. The members of this church were
forbidden to own slaves, to take part in war, engage in lawsuits,
indulge in intemperance or profanity, which, if persisted in, was a
cause for the expulsion of a member from the society, and the whole body
was in duty bound to keep a watch upon the actions of each other. Their
practices so generally agreed with their principles, that society was
compelled to admit that the profession of a Quaker or Friend, as they
usually styled themselves, was a guaranty of a morality above the
ordinary level of the world.

The founder of this remarkable sect was George Fox, a shoemaker of
Leicestershire, England, who, at the early age of nineteen, conceived
the idea that he was called of God to preach the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ. He attacked the coldness and spiritual deadness of all the
modes and forms of religious worship around him, and soon excited a
persecuting spirit which marked his ministerial life of about forty
years as a pilgrimage from one prison to another. When, in 1650, he was
called before Justice Bennet, of Derby, he admonished that magistrate to
repent and "tremble and _quake_ before the word of the Lord," at the
same time his own body was violently agitated with his intense emotions.
The magistrate and other officers of the court then and there named him
a "Quaker" out of derision, a term which the society have since come to
use themselves.

William Penn, the son of a distinguished English admiral, became an
early convert to this religion. At an early age, while at college, he
embraced the doctrines and adopted the mode of life of George Fox and
his followers. When his father first learned that his son was in danger
of becoming a Quaker, he was incredulous. The admiral was a worldly,
ambitious man and had great plans in view for his son, which would all
be blasted if the precocious youth adopted the new religion. The
struggles of young William Penn with