against the king for restoring them to liberty of person and conscience.
The nightmare fear of Popery overcame their love of religious liberty;
and they meekly offered their necks to the yoke of prelacy as the only
security against the heavier one of Papist supremacy. In a far different
manner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims and
demands of the hierarchy in his time. "They entreat us," said he, "that
we be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders have
hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be our
justices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state. They pray
us that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us with
their bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliament
that they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in their
diabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our wide
wounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, and
mercury. Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-hearted
petition! O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"

Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign of
James II., and his active and influential support of the obnoxious
declaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardly
have been otherwise than that his character should suffer from the
unworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries. His views of
religious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be received
with favor. They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented.
All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whose
convictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what he
regarded as divine illumination. What the council of James yielded upon
grounds of state policy he defended on those of religious obligation.
He had suffered in person and estate for the exercise of his religion.
He had travelled over Holland and Germany, pleading with those in