of
James II., and his active and influential support of the obnoxious
declaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardly
have been otherwise than that his character should suffer from the
unworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries. His views of
religious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be received
with favor. They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented.
All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whose
convictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what he
regarded as divine illumination. What the council of James yielded upon
grounds of state policy he defended on those of religious obligation.
He had suffered in person and estate for the exercise of his religion.
He had travelled over Holland and Germany, pleading with those in
authority for universal toleration and charity. On a sudden, on the
accession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he found
himself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm.
He had free access to the royal ear. Asking nothing for himself or his
relatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be no
longer despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions.
James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with his
dissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief.
Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughly
convinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declaration
as the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will to
men. He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully in
accordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers. He was charitable
to a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearer
insight of their characters would have justified. He saw the errors of
the king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who had
been let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought,
swayed by evil counsels. He remonstrated against the interference of the
king with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aims
of the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be content
with simple toleration. But the constitution of his mind fitted him
rather for the commendation of the good than the denunciation of the bad.
He had little in common with the bold and austere spirit o