American Heroes (20 page)

The orthodox doctrine of resurrection of the dead similarly departed from Christ's insistence on the spirit. Penn did not deny that the dead would be raised, but he regarded as grossly materialistic the notion that men would recover their earthly bodies. It betrayed a continuing sensual element in the orthodox view, as though heaven would be incomplete without a resumption of the earthly pleasures enjoyed in this world. “It makes the Soul,” said Penn, “uncapable of Compleat Happiness without a Fleshly Body, as if Heaven were an Earthly Place to see, walk in, and for all our Outward Senses to be enjoyed and exercised, as in this World, though in an higher degree.” This, Penn maintained, was neither Christian nor Protestant but Mohammedan. And he went on to heap scorn on the notion: if the dead were supposed to rise “so strictly…as they Dyed, then every Man is to rise
Married, [single], Low, High, Fat, Lean, Young, Old, Homely, Handsome,
and according to former Complexion and Sex….” The idea was too ridiculous to contemplate.

The central Quaker doctrine of an inner light, the voice of God in every man, was nothing if not spiritual. To Penn it was no novelty but the essence of Christianity and especially Protestant Christianity. Nor was it difficult to find passages in the writings of Christians from Saint Paul onward that could be interpreted to support it, a task to which Penn gladly devoted himself. Almost all explanations of saving grace, of God's calling of his saints to salvation, could be read as expositions of the Quaker doctrine. Orthodox divines, to be sure, took pains to indicate that saving grace did not involve direct revelation; but the line between the two had always been difficult to maintain, and Quakers relieved themselves of the difficulty by erasing it. The inner light and saving grace, Penn maintained, were one and the same. They were the voice of Christ, who was God within man, enabling man to sin no more, to be made pure and thus acceptable to God.

In answer to the charge that Quakers denied Christ's atonement for sin, Penn developed a distinction made by other Quakers, between past and present sin. Christ's sacrifice, he maintained, was necessary to atone for the sins that every man committed before he submitted to the inner light. Christ justified man before God for these past sins, but this did not excuse future sins. And it was sacrilege to suggest that God would welcome to his bosom men who continued to sin. The inner light, Christ within man, enabled believers to stop sinning. Christ not only atoned for past sins but prevented future ones, and he did so for all men and women who heeded his voice within them. Such a view precluded predestination and robbed original sin of its power. And Penn went on the offensive against both these dogmas. Predestination he derided as the work of narrow, pinched-up souls who made “the Eternal God, as partial as themselves, like some Ancients, That because they could not Resemble God, they would make such Gods as might Resemble them.”

But it was unnecessary to waste much argument on predestination, for it was out of favor in the Church of England anyhow. Penn reserved his greatest scorn for the doctrine of original sin as something that debilitated men and prevented them while in the flesh from ever fully complying with the will of God. Penn dubbed this a “lazy” doctrine for “sin-pleasing times.” It was simply, in his view, an excuse for sinning, and he mocked the orthodox ministers who preached it. “Methinks,” he wrote,

For all his wit, Penn was hard pressed to defend as Protestant a doctrine that resembled so closely the Catholic one of justification by works, but he could cite a good many Protestant divines, as well as Scripture, to show that the presence of saving faith was normally evidenced by good works. And he argued that making good works necessary to salvation was not the same as making them merit salvation. Good works, he said, were

This may seem a distinction without much difference, but Penn was convinced that “Preferring Opinion before Piety hath filled the World with
Perplexing Controversies,”
and this was one of them. The Puritan's tendency to separate saving grace from morality seemed to him monstrous. Indeed, “This Distinction betwixt moral and Christian,” he thought, was
“a deadly Poyson these latter Ages have been infected with
to the Destruction of Godly Living, and
Apostatizing
of those Churches [Presbyterian and Congregational] in whom there might once have been begotten some
Earnest, Living Thirst
after the Inward Life of Righteousness.” It was God who had joined grace and virtue, and it was human “stinginess of spirit,” not Protestantism, that separated them.

In demonstrating the Christian and Protestant character of Quakerism, Penn knew that he had to meet other Protestants on their own ground. They would not listen to an argument that defended the inner light and other Quaker doctrines by means of the inner light itself. Erudition was what it would take, and in spite of his hostility to learning, Penn was prepared to supply erudition, probably better equipped to do so than any other Quaker. He knew Latin. He knew French. He knew enough Greek to discuss Greek texts of the New Testament. He could even put on a display of linguistic pyrotechnics (discussing the ninth chapter of First John) that included translations into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee (though it is clear that he did not know all these). Although he was no theologian and thought that theologians were in large measure responsible for the apostasy of Christianity from its primitive purity, he had studied the church fathers and the scholastic and Protestant divines enough to mine their writings for arguments. Similarly, although he held fast to the Quaker insistence that the inner light was a more direct and reliable avenue to God's will than the Scriptures, he knew the Scriptures backward and forward and could always summon up appropriate passages to serve his cause.

Penn's usual method of attack was to refute his opponents by appeals to reason and to Scripture and then to offer voluminous passages from past authorities. For example, in arguing that the inner light was present and recognized in all men before Christ's appearance as well as after, he quoted, among others, passages from Orpheus, Hesiod, Thales, Sybilla, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Timaeus Locrus, Antis thenes, Plato, Parmenides Magnus, Zeno, Chrysippus, Antipater, Hieron, Sophocles, Menander, Philo, Cleanthes, Plutarch, Epictetus, Seneca, Diogenes, Xenocrates, Virgil, Justin Martyr, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Augustine. In defending the Quaker refusal to take oaths, he dredged up no fewer than 122 authorities from ancient times to the seventeenth century.

When Penn was not occupied in defending the Quaker movement, he was often busy keeping it defensible. He recognized how vulnerable it was to the charge that reliance on the inner light could be used to justify any kind of conduct, say, “Murder, Adultery, Treason, Theft,
or any such like Wickedness
.” In answer he could only say, in effect, that it did not, that “God's Spirit makes People free from Sin, and
not to commit Sin
.” Which was to say that Quaker morality was for the most part conventional Protestant morality: the inner light did not call Quakers to immoral actions. But Quakers had broken with convention at several points: in their mode of address, in refusing to take oaths, in wearing their hats before their betters. Penn was aware that some members, having broken convention at one point, might throw it to the winds. Such had been the case with another group, the so-called Ranters, antinomians who defined their actions, whatever they might be, as righteous by attributing them to the spirit of Christ within them. This was dangerously close to Quaker doctrine, and if Quakers were to gain the acceptance Penn thought they deserved, it was necessary to keep the movement free from such anarchistic tendencies.

Accordingly Penn took a strong stand, along with George Fox, in support of a church discipline that could restrain eccentricity and eccentrics. There was, for example, the case of William Mucklow, who carried his attachment to his hat to a stage that violated the whole purpose of Quaker practice. Quakers refused to take off their hats to human superiors in order to testify against worldly honors, and they could thereby distinguish their reverence for God by taking off their hats in worship. But Mucklow insisted on wearing his hat in prayer. When admonished for it, he fell back on the inner light and denied the right of the church to command his conscience. Others took up the same cry, challenging the right of the weekly, monthly, or yearly meetings of Quakers to supervise the conduct of members, including the right that the meetings had begun to exercise, of determining the appropriateness of members' marriages.

In these controversies Penn was always on the side of authority, affirming the right of the church to rid itself of “Wrong Spirits under never such right Appearances.” His commitment was not simply to the doctrines of Quakerism but to the movement. He was ready to use arguments that he would have scorned in a Church of England man, maintaining that the majority in a church were more likely to be right than any individual, and advising anyone who dissented to “wait upon God in Silence and Patience…and as thou abidest in the
Simplicity of the
TRUTH, thou wilt receive an Understanding with the rest of thy Brethren.” And if this failed, “since the Spirit of the Lord is one in all, it ought to be obey'd through another, as well as in one's self.” If anyone persisted in mistaking his own idiosyncrasies for the Spirit of the Lord, the only recourse was to expel him from the movement.

With Penn's assistance, though it required adjusting principles a little, the Quakers avoided the errors of the Ranters. Though Quakers remained at the outer edge of Protestantism, they became, thanks in no small measure to Penn, a recognized church, a force in the world, unlike the ephemeral groups around them. And Penn, fervently a Quaker, could continue to think of himself as a Protestant.

T
HE
G
ENTLEMAN

That Penn was a gentleman and remained a gentleman is apparent both in his behavior and in his beliefs. His social position gave him an access to power that no other Quaker enjoyed. At the same time, his gentility affected his understanding of Quakerism's most controversial doctrine and helped to shape that doctrine in ways that presented a special challenge to men of his class.

The most radical departure of Quakerism from orthodox Protestantism was its insistence on the possibility of perfection in this world, the possibility of living entirely as God would have us live, pure and sinless. When Penn called on Christians to take up Christ's cross in opposition to the ways of the world, he did not think he was asking the impossible. True Christians could imitate Christ, for Christ would enable them to make the imitation, to become pure and sinless. But what did purity and sinlessness require?

Since Penn continually emphasized the affinity of Christ for the poor and humble and of the poor and humble for Christ, it would be plausible to suppose that he thought the imitation of Christ required poverty, that those of his own class who gave up the ways of the world had to give up the privileges and perquisites that went with wealth and rank. And the Quaker refusal to recognize worldly honors in forms of address and behavior would seem to support such a supposition. But Penn took pains to assure everyone that this was not his meaning.

We get our first hint of his position in
No Cross No Crown
, immediately after his defiant statement that if Quaker doctrine will overthrow all distinctions among men, so be it, the apostle James must bear the blame, not the Quakers. This ringing declaration is followed by a statement that sounds odd to modern ears, beginning with a derision of worldly honors and closing with an affirmation of the obligations that Christianity imposes on the different ranks of men: “The World's Respect,” he says, “is an Empty Ceremony, no Soul or Substance in it. The Christian's is a solid Thing, whether by Obedience to Superiors, Love to Equals, or
Help
and
Countenance
to Inferiors.” Superiors, inferiors, equals—to an age that associates human progress with equality, Christian perfection would seem to have little to do with the duties of inferiors toward superiors or of superiors toward inferiors.

What this passage tells us is that Penn's world was not ours. It was a world that, for all its faults, still bore the mark of its Creator. Most of the people who lived in it violated the Creator's intention in many ways but not in the orderly, hierarchical structure of their societies. That kind of order, for Penn (and for virtually everyone else at the time) was part of the original plan. “Divine Right,” Penn believed, “runs through more Things of the World, and Acts of our Lives, than we are aware of; and Sacrilege may be committed against more than the Church.” It could be committed, one gathers, by ignoring social order as much as by following the empty ceremonies that proffered unfelt or exaggerated honor. “Envy none,” Penn told his children, for “it is God that maketh Rich and Poor, Great and Small, High and Low.”