Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

house on South Second Street, afterwards called the Governor's House, had an orchard and fine garden around it, which, says the admiring chronicler, "equalizes any I have ever seen, having a very famous and pleasant summer-house erected in the middle of his garden, abounding with tulips, pinks, carnations, roses and lilies, not to mention those that grew wild in the fields, and also a fine lawn upon which reposed his herd of tranquil deer."

If the Friend modestly, or with an affectation of modesty, called his coach "a convenience," it was none the less a coach. The Proprietary early drove his coach in Philadelphia, and from thence to Pennsbury, and Isaac Norris, the son of an English merchant who had settled in Jamaica, sent to England for a coach, and, although a strict Quaker, did not scruple to have the three falcons' heads of the family shield emblazoned upon its side. The Norrises also had their portraits painted while in London, which was a custom objected to later by Quakers as savoring of the world. In her picture by Kneller, Mrs.

Isaac Norris appears as one of the most beautiful women of her time, nor is her costume strictly Friendly, the prevailing colors being red and green, the lovely hair rolled back from the forehead and worn without a cap.

There was no persecution for religion in Pennsylvania; but there was less friendliness between the Quakers and the Church people, as the latter came to have more authority and influence in the government. Such spicy expletives as the "Hot Church Party," and "Colonel Quarry's Packed Vestry," we find in the mouths of good Friends of the day, while William Penn, in a letter to James Logan, says that Governor Gookin has presented Parson Evans* with "two as gaudy and costly Common Prayer Books as the Queen has in her chapel, and intends as fine a Communion table, both of which charm the baby in the Bishop of London, as well as Parson Evans."

*This was the Rev. Evan Evans, rector of Christ Church parish in 1719.

Something like uniformity of thought and purpose prevailed in Colonial New England, with the exception of Rhode Island, which, like the Provinces of Pennsylvania and Maryland, early became a refuge for the disaffected from the neighboring settlements, naturally inducing a more restless religious life and a larger religious toleration. Mr. Lodge attributes the strong and sustained individuality of the New England people not simply to their Puritanism, but also to the fact that they were of English strain, with only slight admixture from other nationalities. "Race, language, religious belief, manners, customs, and habits of mind and thought were," he says, "the same from the forests of Maine to the shores of Long Island Sound. . . . They were all pure Englishmen, the purest part of the race perhaps, for during a century and a half [in 1765] they had lived in a New World, and received no fresh infusion of blood from any race. but their own."

The Quaker who came to Pennsylvania was quite as single-minded as the Puritan

of New England, and as sincere and earnest in following the guidance of that "inner light" which stood with him for duty, conscience, all that belongs to the moral and spiritual development of man, as was his New England brother in carrying out the rules and ordinances of the religious body to which he belonged. While the New England Colonies were developing along their own lines, with scant charity for those whose ideas ran in other channels, Pennsylvania, from her position and charter, became the home not only of the English and the Welsh Quaker, who came to it as to his birthright of freedom, religious and civil, but of the English Churchman, with his more conservative notions; of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, as firmly established in his spiritual convictions as the Puritan, although less favorably placed by Providence for the direction of his neighbor's conscience; of the Roman Catholic; of the German and Swedish Lutheran ; and of many less distinct subdivisions of Protestantism. Fourteen years after the settlement of Pennsylvania, Gabriel Thomas

speaks of numerous places of worship in Philadelphia, — of one Anabaptist, one Swedish Lutheran, one Presbyterian, two Quaker meeting-houses, and of a fine church belonging to the Church of England people. This was Christ Church, built in 1695, before the English communion had found an abiding-place in the much older city of Boston. "The place is free for all persuasions," he adds, “in a sober and civil way; for the Church of England and the Quakers bear equal share in the government. They live friendly well together; there is no persecution for religion, nor ever like to be."

From the various admixture of nationalities and creeds in Pennsylvania was evolved, in less than a century, a population representing many shades of belief, political and religious, and with strongly marked differences in character and ways of living. The early Quakers seem to have been less rigid in their manners and customs than those who followed them. The simplicity in dress which gradually obtained was at first a protest against

« AnteriorContinuar »