' / 
 
 ■ 
 
 V 
 
THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 V 
 
 AND ITS 
 
 REALIZATION. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 Delivered on Sunday, October 22D, 1882, in the First 
 Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, • 
 
 ■B 
 
 JOSEPH MAY, 
 
 
 • MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 Spangler & Davis, Printers, 529 Commerce Street, Philadelphia. 
 
■i 0, I 
 Mi 5 L 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 AND ITS 
 
 REALIZATION. 
 
 r- 
 
 r- 
 
 P 
 
 
 
 “ The wilderDGss and the solitary place shall 
 £ be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and 
 bloom as the rose.”—Isaiah, xxxv. ii. 
 
 Perennially strange is the romantic influence ot 
 lapsing time! Like the sun among floating dust, it 
 gilds commonest things with a glory not their own, 
 and interests us in smallest details of centuries gone, 
 while corresponding things of to-day we pass by 
 ^ with not a thrill of emotion. 
 
 J What is the reason of this ? 
 
 > Carlyle compares Time to the poet, who has the 
 art to invest the flnite with infinitude; who “ by 
 intensity of conception, by that gift of transcen¬ 
 dental thought which is fitly named genius and inspi¬ 
 ration, can ennoble the actual into idealness.” But his 
 explanation itself requires explaining perhaps'. What 
 Cis it to make the actual ideal, to bring out the infi- 
 ^ nite element in the finite ? Is it not merely to dis- 
 .jcover and bring to view the truth that is lodged in 
 >every thing that has reality ? Some things in life, as the 
 Mmere vital processes and necessities, are below poetry, 
 ?for they belong wholly to the outward. Whatso¬ 
 ever can be made poetical must have an eternal 
 
 372228 
 
4 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 element in it, that is, it must have truth, moral sig¬ 
 nificance in it. Now from the things remote by the 
 long process of tradition, and the rough handling 
 inseparable from this, the outer, the merely temporal 
 element, is stripped partly. A multitude of external 
 accessories are lost out of view, and only the sub¬ 
 stance of the event or act is preserved to us, in 
 which substance, and making it substance, is the 
 truth of the event contained, which so we are able 
 to see; the more as in reference to long past things 
 our eyes themselves are clearer from prejudice and 
 prepossession. 
 
 But wdth present matters this is not so. Here the 
 truth is deeply overlaid by its accessories and acci¬ 
 dents, it has been as yet neither threshed or win¬ 
 nowed; it has been not yet interpreted by succeed¬ 
 ing events and issues, and finally we are all of us, 
 besides being thus untaught by facts, full of precon¬ 
 ceptions and partisanship, the sport so largely of 
 our temperaments and education. So we discern 
 only the worthless temporal envelope, and not the 
 everlasting kernel. We feel the prose, the insi¬ 
 pidity, and it is impossible for us to do more. Only 
 some prophet, some vates^ prophet and poet in one, 
 can do more than this usually. Even when, as in 
 our late war, we know we are living in great times, 
 few can see the poetry because few really feel the 
 truth of them. That is the reason the war pro¬ 
 duced so little poetry—only one piece worth naming 
 and that a woman’s. For, after all, its deepest issues 
 were but dimly apprehended by the masses. And 
 the day when mere soldiering could deeply inspire 
 men had gone by. The comparatively trivial factious 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 6 
 
 strifes of the Stuart era in England produced a crop 
 of lyrics which can hardly die, because the men were 
 so in earnest for the truth, such as it was, which 
 they were fighting for. Our magnificent struggle 
 gave birth, as I say, to nothing worth the name. 
 The well, at the bottom of which our truth lay, was 
 too deep. A century hence will see it, and then the 
 poetry will come out in fact if not in form. 
 
 I incline to think something of this is true in 
 regard to all our American past. No science has 
 been so ill and clumsily taught as history; the 
 husks and shells forever offered ; the spirit, the truth 
 left unregarded and cast aside. We are taught in 
 youth dates and places and men’s names; what 
 really happened, what men dld^ what events estab¬ 
 lished and helped along we do not learn. We hear 
 the noises of drums and trumpets and the din of 
 battle; but the seed of truth, like all others, springs 
 up noiselessly, and we do not hear or see it growing 
 under the feet of the trampling- hosts. So although 
 this is an era of anniversaries and celebratings, cen¬ 
 tennials and bi-centennials, there has been, to my 
 mind, a hollowness in the apparent joy, and more 
 real interest in the festivities themselves than in the 
 events they commemorate. I fear this will even be 
 more true of the fete which is now approaching than 
 of that of six years ago. There was a clear and 
 -tangible issue recalled before us then; not a very 
 profound one in itself some have thought, yet its 
 issues were, through the grace of circumstances, 
 s great and momentous. Political independence is a 
 , thought easy to grasp, a desire easy to establish in 
 men’s hearts. Csesar himself bears witness that it is 
 
6 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 a vearnino; o;ermane and native to all men’s hearts to 
 he free. But the suggestion, the hidden meaning, 
 the truth, which informed the outward founding of 
 this Commonwealth, although of an order parallel, 
 was deeper and more refined. Perhaps it was less 
 distinctly grasped. Perhaps, too, men really value it 
 less, abstractly. When freedom of opinion is invaded, 
 the exercise of thought forbidden, there are always 
 found those who will hazard and surrender much for 
 it, will even go to the stake for it; but when attained 
 in their own cases the majority seldom so appreciate 
 its beauty and preciousness that they diligently vin¬ 
 dicate it for those who differ from themselves in the 
 details of thought to which mental independence 
 brings them. 
 
 O 
 
 William Penn’s ideal of a State, which he had 
 before him in the founding of this Commonwealth, 
 was unquestionably of the very highest. I think he 
 was himself a great man ; if not a great man of the 
 first order, still truly great. He who is such, it has 
 been said, “ belongs to his age even more than other 
 men, being properly the epitome and synopsis of his 
 age, with its interests and influences ; but belongs 
 likewise to all ages, otherwise he is not great.” 
 Certainly this canon remains true of Penn in both 
 its branches. He was very fairly an epitome of his 
 time, of which the significant movement, the char¬ 
 acteristic, vital idea, was that two-sided one of per¬ 
 sonal and mental independence. Cromwell had come 
 and gone, indeed, his sun setting in a cloud. But a 
 cloud to last only a night, for the idea of liberty, 
 no new one to the British heart, was not quenched 
 in the vile and foolish era of Charles II or the 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 7 
 
 fatuous reign of James IT, only resting a little, and 
 
 not even that, after the struggle of the greater age 
 
 before. It was still the burden of the best, the most 
 
 real English thought and hope ; indeed it always has 
 
 been from remotest times a plant indigenous in that 
 
 \ 
 
 little island. In Penn’s day the Quakers were by no 
 means practically its best friends, nor most effective 
 servants, but rather the other non-conformists of the 
 Puritan stripe, who would make no terms with a 
 royal dissembler, despised his insincere professions of 
 the liberal princ'ple in religion, and upheld the Test 
 Act as a real bulwark of freedom of conscience. Yet 
 Penn, the intimate of two dissolute kings, whose 
 characteristic ideas and purposes (especially James’s) 
 were exactly antagonistic, held unwaveringly to all 
 the best ideals of personal independence, lie was a 
 true Englishman in this. 
 
 But he was someth!ns: more than an EnHish- 
 man; he approached the type which afterwards 
 drew much of its life from the idealistic soil of 
 France, and made its appearance rather on ours— 
 the Jefferson type—for he loved liberty not merely 
 as the practical fact, the actual right of particular 
 citizens, which was more the English and Puritan 
 way, but he loved it as an abstraction, an idea, and as 
 such, before there was a community to enjoy it, 
 delighted at the, thought of providing for its realiza¬ 
 tion. But besides this principle of 'political freedom, 
 this idealist entered early in life into that other, of 
 which the Quakers were the extreme representatives, 
 of religious and mental freedom. There is some¬ 
 thing inexpressably pathetic, it seems to me, in such 
 popular uprisings as that of Quakerism ; wherein 
 
8 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 you 8oe tliO Truth in its innjesity and force and 
 vitalitj", when flounted and denied among the seem¬ 
 ing great ones, and in the church which should be 
 its sanctuary, coming into the hearts of the ignorant 
 and obscure, men who hardly knew how to inter¬ 
 pret it and so run into vagary and grotesqueness, 
 yet who are overfilled wdth it, love it, accept it, 
 humbly listen, and in a groping wmy tiy faithfully 
 to carry it out in their own lives and to the hearts 
 of other men. That poor leather-clad cobbler, George 
 Fox, his little vessel spilling with his thought of 
 reality in wmrship and morals, of the divinity in man 
 audient, ever and momentarily, of the word from 
 the Infinite Divine, plodding through the muddy 
 lanes, sleeping in barns and under hayricks, wet by 
 (lay and cold by night, refusing doles, fearless of 
 consequences and of men, that he may but reach 
 the hearts of his fellows with his truth, and call 
 them from conventional ways to a true wmrship and 
 a real morality,—I say this humble figure, full of 
 zeal, full of courage, takes his place beside St. Paul. 
 And the men who listened to him, here and there 
 some tender hearted man or \voman of position; once 
 or twuce a true priest; above all, in almost every 
 sense, he who became the founder of this Common¬ 
 wealth, but mainl}^ the humbler sort, to whom the 
 words of Fox brought mental bewilderment along 
 wdth spiritual stir and uprising, these all will touch 
 kind hearts forever with sympathy, and sensitive 
 ones with rebuke also. Nowadays we seem to lack 
 something in having no stakes or jails to go to for 
 our faiths. New truth is almost losing the crown 
 of unpopularity in these hospitable days. 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 9 
 
 William Penn, I say, was in the fullest measure 
 a type also of this other kind of liberty, the spiritual, 
 which early Quakerism presented in the most extreme 
 and abstract form that had been heard of up to his 
 dav, and almost ever since. 
 
 V i 
 
 And it is most interesting to see how the entrance 
 into his mind of this idea and spirit of moral inde¬ 
 pendence inspired him to see truth. As in some of 
 his political utterances he anticipated by a hundred 
 years i\\Q blazing ubiquities^' as Emerson called them, 
 of our Declaration of Independence, so there is hardly 
 anything to be added or modified in his expressions on 
 religious topics. They have the most modern sound 
 conceivable, and equallj^ antici})ate almost the ex- 
 tremest claims of the liberalist of the present day. 
 
 In his “ Address to Protestants of all persua¬ 
 sions” in 1679, he enumerates several great errors 
 of his day, of which two are these. 1st. That of 
 making opinions articles of faith, and of making 
 them at the same time the bond of Christian Commun¬ 
 ion. Here his objections to creeds are as searching 
 and emphatic as words could make them. You 
 would think Dr. Channing was speaking. “ They 
 set the head at work,” he says, “ but not the heart, 
 and what Christ most insisted on is least concerned 
 in this sort of Christianity, for it is opinion, not 
 obedience, notion not regeneration which is aimed 
 at.” “ It had been happy for the world if there had 
 been no other creeds than those Christ and his apostles 
 gave and left, and it is not the least argument against 
 their being needful to Christ’s Communion that Christ 
 and his apostles did not think them so.” 
 
10 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 Consistently ^yith these strong words, the second 
 error he condemns is that of debasing the true value of 
 morality^ under the pretence of higher things. “ It is the 
 custom,” he says, (and I wish his words may ring and 
 penetrate certain quarters today) “it is the custom to 
 decry men of moral lives because they are not of a 
 particular faith.” He reprobates in strongest terms 
 this custom. He ridicules the notion that a man who 
 repeats his creed by heart is sure of being within the. 
 pale of salvation, however profane his life, while 
 another is denied it, though his life is upright, ^^ifhe 
 happens not to he ivell skilled in what may he called the 
 mysteries of the Christian religion'^ They who so 
 maintain deny, he says, that morality is part of 
 Christianity; they “ mistake the end of Christ’s com¬ 
 ing, which was as St. Paul says, to deliver men from 
 actual sinning ; to redeem themjrom. all iniquity.'^ 
 
 Alas, that such words were not only far in 
 advance of Penn’s own age, but still rebuke the 
 utterances of the largest section of the popular church* 
 Again, how far he was beyond his age, and 
 abreast even of the present, he showed in 1674, when 
 he maintained the absolute secularity of government., and 
 claimed that “ Religion under any modification or church 
 government was no part of the old English Constitution ” 
 but that ‘Wo live honestly., to injure not another hut to 
 give every one his- due, entitled every native to the 
 privileges of an Englishman.^^ 
 
 Finally how profound these convictions were, he 
 showed in 1681, when he expressed the fundamental 
 principles of his new^ government in these immortal 
 words: “ In reverence to God, the Father of light and 
 spirits, the author as well as the object of all divine 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 11 
 
 knowledge, faith and worship, Ido, for me and mine, 
 declare and establish for the first fandamental of the 
 government of my province, that every person who 
 shall reside therein, shall enjoy the free profession of 
 his or her faith, and exercise and worship toward 
 God in such way and manner as every such person 
 shall in conscience believe is most acceptable to 
 God. And as long as every such person useth not 
 this Christian liberty to licentiousness or the destruc¬ 
 tion of others, to speak loosely or profanely or con¬ 
 temptuously of God, the Holy Scriptures, or religion, 
 * * he or she shall be protected in the aforesaid 
 
 Christian liberty by the civil magistrate.” 
 
 I cannot refuse the title of greM to the man who 
 could write and enact sentences like those, two hun¬ 
 dred years ago! It is idle to question the sincerity of 
 convictions so expressed, and with which he was en¬ 
 tirely consistent in the whole spirit of his life and lan¬ 
 guage from the days even of youth and as long as he 
 lived. lie had been suffering for them all his life, 
 when his social relations offered him the most easy and 
 prosperous career had he denied them. In the establish¬ 
 ment of the Jerseys, he had incorporated them, and 
 when the opportunity offered of founding a new and 
 greater colony, it was wdth an ardor unquestionally 
 genuine that he embraced it, to realize in its constitu¬ 
 tion these most advanced principles. There could be 
 no more affecting conffrraation of this—were one 
 wanting—than was exhibited in his treatment of the 
 Indians; in which he mingled the- tenderness of a 
 parent wdth the equal respect and justice of man to 
 brother man, conduct which had never before been 
 thought of, and which after two centuries of cruelty 
 
12 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 and bloodshed this great nation is only now beginning 
 to imitate. 
 
 Midway between Penn and us, Pennsylvania’s 
 greatest though adopted citizen, a man of practicality 
 in the extreme, a man of the world, though in the 
 best sense, a moralist, an economist, not an idealist, a 
 hater of cant, naturally enough had something of an 
 repulsion from such a character. Franklin was the 
 typical Puritan in these qualities ; and although he 
 held to the full the original Quaker idea of spiritual 
 liberty and carried its interpretations beyond Penn, 
 could not abide a doctrinaire such as Penn seemed 
 to him to be, nor have patience with his abstract¬ 
 ions. So he sneers at the idealist, whose capacity 
 for practical affairs he evidently doubted and 
 somewhat despised. Speaking of Penn’s original 
 frame of government for Pennsylvania, he says, “ At 
 the head of it is a short preliminary discourse which 
 serves to give us a more lively idea of William Penn 
 preaching in Grace Church Street, than we derive 
 from Eaphael’s cartoon, of Paul preaching at Athens. 
 As a man of conscience he sets out; as a man of 
 reason he proceeds; and as a man of the world he 
 offers the most plausible conditions to all, to the end 
 that he might gain some.” It is incredible that one 
 such hearty lover of freedom could so flout another. 
 But even so, Franklin is compelled immediately to 
 add that “ two paragraphs of this discourse, the 
 people of Pennsylvania ought to have forever before 
 their eyes, to wit: 1st. “Any government is free to 
 the people (whatever be its frame) where the laws 
 rule and the people are a party to those laws. And 
 more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, and confusion. 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 13 
 
 2d. To support power in reverence with the people, 
 and to secure the people from the abuse of power; 
 that the people may be free by their just obedience, 
 and the magistrates honorable for their just adminis¬ 
 tration, are the great end of all government.” 
 
 W ell might the grand old cynic praise words like 
 these! he never himself wrote any more comprehen¬ 
 sive, more suggestive, more true, or more simple. 
 
 Of the merits of the questions which so soon 
 arose between Penn and his colonists; of the perplexi- 
 ities into which he was thrown, of obstacles to his 
 visions and opposition to his efforts, this is not the 
 place to speak, and it is, perhaps, hard now anywhere 
 to judge. I see in them, chiefly, an illustration of 
 the difficulty with which the ideal is always beset in 
 its attempts to become real- Start with any noble 
 ideal, and how at once a crop of practical objects are 
 sprung upon you by “ the men of this generation,” 
 as Jesus called them, who are always so much wiser, 
 at this transition pointy than the children of light. - 
 Objections usually, which need not exist if only all 
 men were ideal, or even unselfish; but they are not^ 
 and this is the thing the man of the world knows 
 best and sees first. So I am not surprised, though it 
 were true, as Franklin further says with his rude 
 incisiveness, that “ when the scene of action was 
 shifted from the mother country to this, the deport¬ 
 ment of the legislator was shifted too. Less of the 
 man of God now appeared^ and more of the man of the 
 worldr Do you remember how Moses, that early man 
 of God, felt and acted when he came down for Mt. 
 Sinai ? So Penn who, like him, had in his retirement 
 at home, smoothly drawn up his utopian framework. 
 
14 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 naturally struck upon practical snags and shoals 
 when he came here to launch it. He doubtless lacked 
 the wisdom and tact of Franklin and w^as possibly 
 wanting in that^6r^, which is the remarkable charac¬ 
 ter of the Puritan type. He was deficient, I judge, in 
 the power of reading and of controlling men. He 
 was compelled to be arbitrary while professing perfect 
 liberality ; he had to feel his way, trying experiments 
 and changing plans, and so gave ofience and handles 
 to his enemies. It-is a result of defective political 
 skill, to become inconsistent and to seem insincere. 
 So he \vas accused of artifice, and of many selfish 
 motives. He w^as full of business troubles, and was 
 largely obliged to direct affairs from home, then 
 indefinitely further away than it is now. He acted 
 too much through others. Finally, with all his 
 ideals and abstractions, he was accustomed to the 
 methods of arbitrary governing; he felt himself the 
 owner of the province, although he so nobly purposed 
 to give it to a free community; and these things made 
 him sometimes arbitrary. Indeed, it soon appeared 
 as was natural, that the men of ihe province itself, 
 who had already breathed the air of freedom, and 
 known it in the concrete, understood it and even 
 valued it, better than the idealist himself. To give 
 symmetry in a dream’s accomplishment, the dreamer 
 has often been willing to lop it, or mould it, here and 
 there. 
 
 But all the objections that have been made 
 appear as small deductions from the greatness and 
 breadth of Penn’s purpose; nor has there perhaps 
 ever entered any man’s mind and heart one grander, 
 or more generous and gracious. Witness one smallest 
 
AND ITS RNALiZATtON. 
 
 15 
 
 but most sio;nificant detail. I doubt if into the fun- 
 daraental constitution of any community on earth 
 there ever before or since entered the short word 
 More wrote his Utopia, Sidney his Arcadia, 
 Harrington (to whom Franklin likens Penn), his 
 Oceana. Penn had the wonderful opportunity of 
 realizing such a dream as these. Would either 
 idealist have succeeded better? 
 
 What shall we say of the actual issue of Penn’s 
 dream ? I wonder what he would say, if he knows 
 it, and we could call upon him? At least, he must 
 confess, were he here, that wonderfully prescient as 
 he w^as, capable of the largest expectations as all his 
 plans show, yet far beyond anything he could then 
 conceive, “ the desert has rejoiced and blossomed as 
 the rose.” It was a bold stroke then, to lay out a 
 city a.mile long; and stretching from river to river, 
 and place its centre where he did, a mile from either 
 stream. His idealism shows-itself in his planning it 
 all according to a type in his own mind, following 
 no ancient pattern, and not leaving it as did the 
 Puritans at Boston, and the Dutchmen at New 
 York, to grow as nature and self-interest should 
 guide it. And still, its main defect (saving the 
 angularity he gave it) comes from his original plan 
 not having grown with the growth of his capital, 
 since it exceeded his utmost boundaries. 
 
 What a pleasing picture he had in mind ! Broad 
 streets coming fairly down to the river; broad house- 
 lots, each with its dwelling in the middle, with its 
 lawn and trees; here and there a meeting-house,-— 
 alas, without a steeple to break the outline, point 
 heavenward and give a welcome to the Sabbath 
 
16 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 morning, such as used to swell from the chimes of 
 his English home. 
 
 But how could he have imagined what we see 
 to-day? An area, I know not how many times 
 greater, packed with life; the green lawns gone, and 
 unsightly brick lanes in place of his broad and open 
 ways. !N^oise and bustle; filth which only heaven’s 
 deluges can purge-, chimneys by thousands sending 
 up their wasteful incense of smoke, witnessing to 
 the million of manufactured wealth each day added 
 to the world’s stock;—the outward scene is an 
 unbeautiful contrast, perhaps. 
 
 But how much which he would rejoice in I 
 Abundance, comfort, convenience, health, culture, 
 progress, typified in a thousand instruments of ser¬ 
 vice and provisions for human life of which the 
 remotest vision could not have come to him, And 
 beyond, over the vast expanding state, farms rich 
 from generations of culture; cattle on a thousand 
 hills; mines, mills and happy homes. 
 
 The real beauty of human life has always to be 
 seen through the rubbish and exuvise it casts aside 
 as it develops. The first effect of man’s coining 
 among the scenes of untamed nature is to blot 
 and scar it. He cuts down the trees, defiles the 
 streams, estranges the timid, trustful beasts, and 
 mars all the beauty and wild dignity he encounters. 
 How magnificent in their virgin, silent freshness, 
 rolled the great Delaware and Schuylkill when only 
 the ineff'ective savage skirted their banks I On their 
 green shores the unassaulted forests, fulfilling nature’s 
 term and dropping only under the stroke of age or 
 lightning, to moulder moss-grown and make new 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 17 
 
 soil for their successors! The grass waved and 
 the flowers twinkled and all was clean and fair. But 
 how useless! how devoid of signiflcance! It was 
 when men^—that ivcre men—came, smote the trees, 
 trampled grass and blossoms, woke up the sleeping 
 soil, and planted something besides crops, that the 
 earth ceased to be mere clay, and the trees mere 
 timber, and the land began to live ; began to have 
 vioral heivg ; began to have history. As body with¬ 
 out spirit, is the world without man. Things have 
 their apotheosis when they are absorbed, even by 
 their outward destruction, into his career. Civiliza¬ 
 tion is nature developed and interpreted. And of 
 all the subjects of human thought, nothing earthly 
 is so impressive as a great organized eommunity of 
 human souls, such as here began to be two centu¬ 
 ries ago! As accummulated force —-original power 
 massed and operative—it is the highest symbol and 
 vsuggestion of divine power, which is not reflected 
 best in the rush of winds or waters, or even in 
 chained and circling stars, but in directing, elaborat- 
 ing, reflective and prescient Thought. This is what 
 is here, the magniflcent living issue of Penn’s dreams 
 and pains and care! 
 
 But what we have rather to inquire about, what 
 we have to hope for, is in our attainment of Penn’s 
 moral ideal; the great principles and moralities of a 
 State free in every sense, in the personal, moral and 
 mental independence of every individual. And, above 
 all, in the virtue, public and private, which he clearly 
 saw and prophesied must be the corner stone, or the 
 vital force, of free institutions. As I think of this,^ 
 it occurs to me irresistibly, that, were he back 
 
18 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 among us, the Founder might not be altogether as 
 Avell pleased as we might think. Two hundred 
 years is a long time! The Idealist is apt to be 
 impatient. Is it certain that he would be satisfied 
 with the progress his province has made? The 
 wealth, the material expansion, would be a marvel, I 
 have said; but Penn was quite capable of looking 
 through and beyond all this, and enquiring whether 
 in those subtler and finer attainments we have made 
 a corresponding advance. 
 
 At this point there are always, I fear, disappoint¬ 
 ment and surprise waiting on the study of history. 
 Truth moves, no doubt, with the irresistible power 
 of these vast glaciers, mountains of ice, that once 
 ploughed over the whole northern slope of this con¬ 
 tinent, scoping out lake beds, channelling rivers, and 
 scoring with their eternal autographs the granite 
 rocks. But, alas, it seems, also, to move almost as 
 slowly. It even gives an interest to the past to find 
 how alike men are, now and in almost the remotest 
 civilized times. But it seems strange, too, that 
 generation after generation passes, century after cen¬ 
 tury, and the obstinate substance of human char¬ 
 acter ai)pears to mollify and refine hardly faster than 
 the geologic structure of the planet. I half fear that 
 Penn might say,—the country has changed, indeed, 
 —but the men ? The quarrels and cabals of his legis¬ 
 lative body, the bickerings and backbitings, the 
 jealousy of some, the avarice of others, on w^hom he 
 had to lean,—alas, have they not more than a 
 parallel in the doings and the characters of men in 
 like places after two centuries ? And, if back of all 
 this, back of all the vulgarity and chicanery of 
 
AND ITS DEALIZATION. 
 
 19 
 
 politics, and the greed of business, there is that vast, 
 happy mass of domestic virtue and happiness, which 
 makes no sign in the papers, but is the strength of 
 society everywhere, so it has always been. In the 
 days when Eome was at its worst, or Paris or 
 London was at its worst, I suppose there was always 
 this suhstratiim of morality, simplicity and religious¬ 
 ness which'saved society, as it saves it to-day—but 
 which is too quiet and uneventful to have left its 
 annals. Historians, as Carlyle complains so bitterly, 
 have heretofore almost passed this by, and have 
 regaled the one who supposes he is studying history, 
 with the squabbles of kings and the vices of courts. 
 Almost alone through biography and poetry we get 
 glimpses of this under-current of real human life 
 and find human character three or four thousand 
 years ago, or two hundred years ago, so nearly like 
 what it still is, that one feels as if the Avhole ques¬ 
 tion of progress were something different from what 
 we commonly suppose. 
 
 And yet we certainly do know more truth, we 
 see more widely ; even, I believe, the mass of society 
 are better men and women, in something like a fair 
 proportion to the more and better they have had a 
 chance to learn. The mass then were not Penns, nor 
 even Foxes. If we could look into the mind of the 
 average citizen of 1682 and see the ideas and prin¬ 
 ciples by which it was inhabited, his thought of life, 
 of God and his ways, of human nature, of moral 
 duty, and compare these with the corresponding con¬ 
 tents of a like man’s mind of to-day; if we could 
 see how much is now settled, passed into the region 
 of established truth and of the commonplace, which 
 
20 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 then was visionary and questionable, we might even 
 say the two hundred years had been time well spent. 
 At least the world never made more progress in such 
 a space of time. We are often misled, as I have hinted, 
 looking into the past, by taking the utterances of 
 its great and prescient souls as the standard of their 
 generation’s thought. See that the truth ’of politi¬ 
 cal liberty, now as familiar to us as dsf^ly breath, 
 was two hundred years ago, even in England, a tree 
 new planted and struggling, needing careful nurture 
 and protection, its broadest interpretations almost 
 .narrow beside what you and I enjoy as the normal 
 condition of our lives; while the higher thought of 
 mental and religious liberty was a grand but diffi¬ 
 cult ideal, for which it was still possible to die. It 
 took, indeed, one of the greatest of wars, which youi 
 and I remember shuddering, to teach our own gener¬ 
 ation the last corollaries of the former; and of the 
 latter creeds and sects, and many a jealousy lingering 
 among men of differing thought, show that still 
 we have much to learn. And yet again how much 
 has come and gone, what fetters have been broken, 
 what barriers broken down, since the Mayflower 
 and the Welcome tempted the troubled Atlantic to 
 plant the seed of wffiat we are 1 
 
 In the providence of God it was the Puritans, 
 men of action, men of force, of short views, perhaps, 
 and narrower purposes, but of stout hearts and 
 strong brains, resolved, cool, clear, who fought the 
 outward battle of two-fold liberty and won its vic¬ 
 tory. The Quakers were rather the seers of those 
 days, its prophets crying aloud, often things gro¬ 
 tesque and absurd, yet also supplying many a strain 
 
AND ITS REALIZATION. 
 
 21 
 
 of ideal thought, and from whose patient sufferings 
 we cannot tell how much was contributed, as by the 
 martyrdom of Stephen to the conversion of Paul, to 
 educate the sentiment of their time. Not all were 
 fanatics; although their greatest, beautiful concep¬ 
 tion of Divine guidance was too suhtile and immense 
 for those days and who can interpret it in these ? But 
 even Mary Dyer and her fellow martyrs on Boston 
 Common died not quite in vain ; and if the prin¬ 
 ciples of Fox and Penn stiffened into a cultus as 
 rigid, and even more so, than that of Puritanism, it 
 has produced a type of character and individual 
 examples of manhood and womanhood, staunch, 
 pure, serene, of singular vision for moral truth, 
 and marvellous consistency in abiding by it, of 
 which its inheritors ought to he generously proud 
 and to cherish forever. The greatest woman of 
 America, whose fragile presence but whose massive 
 thought and searching eloquence are among the 
 choicest incidental associations even of these walls, 
 was a genuine product of Quakerism, and showed 
 what fruit it could hear, as her name reminds us that 
 the practical culture of her sect is a definite witness, 
 not to be gainsaid, to one of the greatest of social 
 truths ; to what human society was meant to be and 
 will be when its most radical reform, still too slowly 
 moving, is accomplished, and the true equality of 
 all its members, without regard to the physical dis¬ 
 tinction of sex, is attained and established. 
 
 The fine ideal of William Penn went the way 
 of all things human when it sought to realize itself; 
 but in furnishing a home for such principles as those 
 to which his peculiar people have borne witness, and 
 
22 
 
 THE IDEAL COMMONWEALTH 
 
 a theatre for their practical maintenance and test, he 
 did an inestimable service to his kind, and to our 
 nation. 
 
 Conscience, equality, peace, temperance, un¬ 
 worldliness, patience, serenity, trust in God and the 
 truth;—to have planted a people whose function it 
 has been for two centuries to bear testimony to these 
 truths, to mould them into character and to offer 
 them an example to the world, this is a service 
 which should make the name of William Penn 
 imperishable. 
 
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