Parallel between William Penn and John Locke

PARALLEL BETWEEN WILLIAM PENN AND JOHN LOCKE. George Bancroft, born at Worcester, Mass., Oct. 3, 1800, liberally educated at Harvard and Göttingen. He early devoted himself to historical writing, publishing the first volume of his "History of the United States" in 1834. This great work is characterized (in the language of the historian Prescott,) "by a brilliant and daring style, picturesque sketches of character and incident, acute reasoning and compass of erudition." Ten volumes have appeared, bringing the work down to the close of the Revolution in 1782, and two concluding volumes, closing with the constitutional period, 1789, are to be issued in 1881. Mr. Bancroft's public services, as Secretary of the Navy in 1845-6, minister to Great Britain 1846-49, and minister to Germany in 1867-74, have conferred additional distinction upon himself and upon his country. Removing to Washington upon his return from Europe in 1874, and surrounded with one of the richest collections of books and manuscripts ever gathered, Mr. Bancroft enjoys a serene old age, addicted to those historical studies for which his wide converse with books and with men, and his native zest for keen philosophical inquiry have eminently fitted him. Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the energy of his mind to the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that "heavenly end" he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his character. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom; as with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever overflowing heart; and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and "surpassing in speculative endowments;" conversant with men, and books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations, as they existed in England and France, in Holland and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the sources of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and by suffering; familiar with the peace of family; intimate with Sunderland and Sydney; acquainted with Russell, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham; as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton and the great scholars of his age,—he valued the promptings of a free mind above the awards of the learned, and reverenced the single-minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke when, twelve years before, he had framed the constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was come to the New World to lay the foundations of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher? Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant; both loved freedom; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn, at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which time and chance scrawled their experience; to Penn, the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed that, when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, "Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;" to Penn, it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed "the duty of parents to preserve their children not to be understood without reward and punishment;" Penn loved his children without a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that "there must be a people before a government," and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to "inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts;" Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in;" Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as