iesce in the change
by abdicating political preferment.[143:1] The religious influence of
the Society of Friends continued to be potent and in many respects most
salutary. But the exceptional growth and prosperity of the colony was
attended with a vast "unearned increment" of wealth to the first
settlers, and the maxim, "Religio peperit divitias, et mater devorata
est a prole,"[143:2] received one of the most striking illustrations in
all history. So speedily the Society had entered on its Middle
Age;[143:3] the most violent of protests against formalism had begun to
congeal into a precise and sometimes frivolous system of formalities.
But the lasting impress made on the legislation of the colony by Penn
and his contemporaries is a monument of their wise and Christian
statesmanship. Up to their time the most humane penal codes in
Christendom were those of New England, founded on the Mosaic law. But
even in these, and still more in the application of them, there were
traces of that widely prevalent feeling that punishment is society's
bitter and malignant revenge on the criminal. The penal code and the
prison discipline of Pennsylvania became an object of admiring study for
social reformers the world over, and marked a long stage in the
advancement of the kingdom of God. The city of Philadelphia early took
the lead of American towns, not only in size, but in its public
charities and its cultivation of humane arts.

Notwithstanding these eminent honors, there is much in the later history
of the great commonwealth in which Quakerism held dominion for the
greater part of a century to reflect doubt on the fitness of that form
of Christianity for conducting the affairs, either civil or religious,
of a great community.

There is nothing in the personal duty of non-resistance of evil, as
inculcated in the New Testament, that conflicts with the functions of
the civil governor--even the function of bearing the sword as God's
minister. Rather, each of these is the complement and counterpart of the
other. Among the early colonial governors no man wielded the sword of
the ruler more effectively than the Quaker Archdale in the Carolinas. It
is when this law of personal duty is assumed as the principle of public
government that the order of society is inverted, and the function of
the magistrate is inevitably taken up by the individual, and the old
wilderness law of blood-revenge is reinstituted. The legislation of
William Penn invo