William Penn’s Holy Experiment “The Seed of a Nation”: A Real Example of Tolerance & Equality

King Charles II and the British passed the Conventicle Act of 1664, making it illegal to hold church meetings of over five people.

It prohibited “… more than five persons in addition to members of the family, for any religious purpose not according to the rules of the Church of England.”

The word “conventicle” is derived from the word “convenant” and referred to gatherings of church members according to Jesus’ promise in Matthew 18:20, “Where two or three are met together in my name.”

The English Book of Canon Law, Article 11, stated:

“All conventicles and secret meetings … have ever been justly accounted very hateful to the state …

No priests or ministers of the Word of God, nor any other persons, shall meet together in any private house or elsewhere … under pain of excommunication ipso facto.”

John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress was arrested in 1661 under an earlier Conventicle Act, for having held:

“several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom.”

Then the King and Parliament passed The Five Mile Act of 1665.

It forbade non-conforming and dissenting clergymen from preaching or living within five miles of a town, unless they swore never again to resist the government.

Thousands of ministers courageously defied this Act and were deprived of a means of making a living.

In 1670, 25-year-old William Penn defied the government and preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a group in the city of London.

He was arrested and tried in Bushel’s Case.

In the records of the court’s proceedings:

Penn: “I desire you would let me know by what law it is you prosecute me, and upon what law you ground my indictment.”

Justice Howel: “Upon the common-law.”

Penn: “Where is that common-law?”

Justice Howel: “You must not think that I am able to run up so many years, and over so many adjudged cases, which we call common-law, to answer your curiosity. You are a saucy fellow, speak to the Indictment.”

Penn: “This answer I am sure is very short of my question, for if it be common, it should not be so hard to produce … The question is not, whether I am guilty of this Indictment, but whether this Indictment be legal.

It is too general and imperfect an answer, to say it is the common-law, unless we knew both where and what it is.

For where there is no law, there is no transgression; and that law which is not in being, is so far from being common, that it is no law at all.”

Justice Howel: “Sir, you are a troublesome fellow, and it is not for the honor of the court to suffer you to go on … Take him away.”

The judge ordered Penn bound and gagged, but as he was taken away, he shouted to the jury:

“You are Englishmen, mind your Privilege, give not away your Right.”

Juror Edward Bushel responded, “Nor shall we ever do.”

When the jury refused to convict Penn, the judge ordered the entire jury thrown in jail:

“You shall go together and bring in another verdict, or you shall starve.”

A plaque at London’s Old Bailey Law Courts reads:

“Near this site William Penn and William Read were tried in 1670 for preaching to an unlawful assembly in Grace Church Street.

This tablet commemorates the courage and endurance of the jury: Thomas Vere, Edward Bushel, and ten others, who refused to give a verdict against them, although locked up without food for two nights and were fined for their final verdict of not guilty.

The case of these jurymen was reviewed on a Writ of Habeas Corpus and Chief Justice Vaughan delivered the opinion of the court which established “The Right of Juries” to give their Verdict according to their Convictions.”

Penn was locked up on London’s notorious Newgate Prison, where he wrote:

“By liberty of conscience, we understand not only a mere liberty of the mind …

but the exercise of ourselves in a visible way of worship, upon our believing it to be indispensably required at our hands, that if we neglect it for fear or favor of any mortal man, we sin, and incur divine wrath.”

Penn wrote:

“My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.”

Another dissenter in London’s Newgate Prison, who defied government mandates restricting churches, was an early Baptist leader Thomas Helwys, who had written in 1612:

“The King is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them.”

Thomas Helwys died in the Newgate Prison in 1616, but not before writing A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity:

“If the Kings people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all humane laws made by the King, our Lord the King can require no more:

for men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man.”

A later Baptist minister, John Leland, who helped found Baptist churches in America, wrote in Rights of Conscience Inalienable, 1791:

“Every man must give account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience.

If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”

William Penn was arrested numerous times for sharing the Gospel with his politically incorrect views that believers should be free to follow their consciences.

Several times he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Penn wrote in England’s Present Interest Considered, 1675:

“Force makes hypocrites, ’tis persuasion only that makes converts.”

Several times, Penn’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn, paid the fine to have his son released from prison.

Penn told his father:

“I entreat thee not to purchase my liberty.”

As he was dying, Penn’s father told his son:

“Let nothing in this world tempt you to wrong your conscience.”

In repayment of a debt owed to Admiral Penn, King Charles II, in 1682, surprisingly gave to his son, William Penn, land in America recently acquired from the Dutch and Swedes — 45,000 square miles.

King Charles named this enormous amount of land, 29 million acres, “Pennsylvania.”

As a result of Charles II’s generosity, young William Penn had become the largest non-royalty landowner in the world.

While most countries demanded that citizens believe as the government dictated, Penn’s colony was a “holy experiment” where Christians, Jews, and others who believed in God to could live together in religious toleration.

This was an unprecedented endeavor in the world, taking place at a time in history when

Penn wrote in his Charter of Privileges for Pennsylvanians 1701:

“… because no people can be truly happy though under the greatest enjoyments of civil liberties if abridged of the freedom of their consciences as to their religious profession and worship.”

He wrote to a friend, January 1, 1681, that for his colony, he would:

“… make and establish such laws as shall best preserve true Christian and civil liberty, in all opposition to all unchristian … practices.”

Soon there arrived in Pennsylvania:

From 1700 to 1750, Britain’s laws against dissenters drove some 200,000 Scots and Scots–Irish Presbyterians from Scotland and Ireland to America.

One of the laws was the Riot Act of 1714, which prohibited 12 or more dissenters from meeting together. Authorities read the Act out loud, ordering them to disperse, before arresting everyone for illegally meeting.

Most Scots and Scots-Irish settled in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley and in the western counties of Lehigh, Bucks and Lancaster.

Others came, including:

William Penn died on JULY 30, 1718.

He had named his capital city Philadelphia, which means “Brotherly Love.”

Lutheran missionary Johannes Campanius dedicated Philadelphia’s first church, Gloria Dei “Old Swede’s” Church in 1646.

Penn’s religious tolerance allowed the church to continue, and they erected their present church building in 1698.

Johannes Campanius translated the very first book published in the Algonquin Indian language, Martin Luther’s Small Catechism.

In 1695, the Merion Friends (Quaker) Meeting House was built. It is the oldest church building in Pennsylvania and second oldest Friends meeting house in the United States.

In 1695, Philadelphia’s Christ Church was built.

It is called “the Nation’s Church” as individuals who worshiped there included:

Others who worshiped at Christ Church included signers of the Declaration of Independence:

In 1711, Old Trinity Episcopal Church was built in Philadelphia.

In 1732, the Seventh Day Dunkers (German Baptist Brethern) built Ephrata Cloister near Philadelphia.

They had the second German printing press in America.

They published “Martyrs Mirror,” the largest book printed in America prior to the Revolutionary War, listing Christian martyrs from Christ until 1660.

Rev. Richard Denton brought the Presbyterian faith to American in 1644.

In 1692, just ten years after the arrival of William Penn, the first Presbyterian Church was organized in Philadelphia, in a building called “Barbadoes Warehouse,” being shared with Baptists and Congregationalists.

In 1704, Philadelphia’s First Presbyterian Church moved to the corner of Bank Street and High Street (Market), where they build their first church building.

Members of the church included signers of the Declaration of Independence:

On May 21, 1789, the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America was held at the church in Philadelphia.

The first sermon at that assembly was preached by John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton University and a Signer of the Declaration of Independence.

In 1807, the first African Presbyterian Church was founded by a former slave, John Gloucester.

At the time of the Revolution:

William J. Shepherd, writing for The Catholic University of American, stated in the article “The Archivist’s Nook: Catholic Patriots of the American Revolution” (June 23, 2016):

“Catholics made up only an estimated one percent of the population of the nascent republic. Colonial America was generally prejudiced against Catholics … with the notable exception of Pennsylvania.”

There were only seven Jewish congregations in the colonies prior to the Revolution, two of which were in Pennsylvania:

The first Jews in America were Sephardic, having fled from Spain, to Portugal, to South America and the West Indies.

From the West Indies, Sephardic Jews came to the colonies of North America, the first of which was New Amsterdam, which became New York.

When the British captured New York in 1776, many Jews fled to Pennsylvania.

Mikveh Israel congregation built the first synagogue building in Philadelphia in 1782.

Contributors to the building fund included:

Beginning in 1845, Rabbi Isaac Leeser of Mikveh Israel synagogue produced the first Jewish translation of the Bible in English to be published in the United States.

When Mikveh Israel synagogue burned in 1872, Philadelphia’s Christ Church contributed to rebuild it.

The two congregations have a long custom of sharing a fellowship-dinner once a year which alternates between their two buildings.

In 1795, the first Ashkenazic Jewish synagogue in the Western Hemisphere was founded in Philadelphia, Congregation Rodeph Shalom.

During the colonial era, Catholics were mostly in just two colonies: Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Bishop John Carroll, founder of Georgetown University and cousin of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration, wrote to Rome in 1790:

“The thirteen provinces of North America rejected the yoke of England, they proclaimed, at the same time, freedom of conscience …

Before this great event, the Catholic faith had penetrated two provinces only, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In all the others the laws against Catholics were in force.”

In 1733, Philadelphia allowed the first English-speaking Catholic Church in the world after the Reformation – St. Joseph Church.

It was the only place in the entire British Empire where a public Catholic church service took place legally.

During the Revolution, French Generals Marquis de Lafayette and Comte de Rochambeau worshiped there.

Pennsylvania’s Quakers and Mennonites led the state to be the first in the nation to pass legislation to end slavery.

America’s first abolition society, The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, was founded in Philadelphia in 1775.

After the Revolutionary War, it was reorganized in 1784 with Benjamin Franklin as its first president.

Philadelphia is the birthplace of the Methodist Episcopal churches in America, with St. George’s Church, built in 1769, being the denomination’s oldest church building in continuous service in the world.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, sent the church a communion chalice.

The pastor of St. George’s was Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop.

He traveled 270,000 miles on horseback and ordained more than 4,000 ministers, including Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the first African American Lay Preachers of Methodism in 1785.

In 1792, Absalom Jones started the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, being the oldest black Episcopal congregation in the United States.

In 1794, Richard Allen started the African Methodist Episcopal Church, building “Mother Bethel,” the first A.M.E. Church in America.

In 1796, also out of St. George’s, Rev. “Black Harry” Hosier started the African Zoar Church.

St. George’s appointed Mary Thorne as the first woman class leader.

The Charter that King Charles II signed and gave to William Penn on March 4, 1681, stated:

“Whereas our trusty and well beloved subject, William Penn, esquire, son and heir of Sir William Penn, deceased, out of a commendable desire to enlarge our English Empire …

and also to reduce the savage natives by gentle and just manners to the love of civil society and Christian religion, hath humbly besought leave of us to transport an ample colony unto … parts of America not yet cultivated and planted.”

After receiving the Charter, William Penn wrote:

“It is a clear and just thing, and my God who has given it me through many difficulties, will, I believe, bless and make it the seed of a nation.”

William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of “Brotherly Love” resulted in Philadelphia providentially being the birthplace of the nation, as it was there that

Psalm 133:1 “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”