When the frenzy of domination, that dreadful passion of the human heart, had reached its greatest excess; when the monk Hildebrand, elected bishop of Rome against the laws, wrested that capital from the emperors, and forbade all the bishops of the west from bearing the name of pope, in order to appropriate it to himself alone; when the bishops of Germany, following his example, made themselves sovereigns, which all those of France and England also attempted; from those dreadful times down even to our own, certain Christian societies have arisen which, under a hundred different names, have endeavored to re-establish the primitive equality in Christendom. But what had been practicable in a small society, concealed from the world, was no longer so in extensive kingdoms. The church militant and triumphant could no longer be the church humble and unknown. The bishops and the large, rich, and powerful monastic communities, uniting under the standards of the new pontificate of Rome, fought at that time _pro aris et focis_, for their hearths and altars. Crusades, armies, sieges, battles, rapine, tortures, assassinations by the hand of the executioner, assassinations by the hands of priests of both the contending parties, poisonings, devastations by fire and sword--all were employed to support and to pull down the new ecclesiastical administration; and the cradle of the primitive church was so hidden as to be scarcely discoverable under the blood and bones of the slain. _Of the Primitives called Quakers._ The religious and civil wars of Great Britain having desolated England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the unfortunate reign of Charles I., William Penn, son of a vice-admiral, resolved to go and establish what he called the primitive Church on the shores of North America, in a climate which appeared to him to be mild and congenial to his own manners. His sect went under the denomination of "Quakers," a ludicrous designation, but which they merited, by the trembling of the body which they affected when preaching, and by a nasal pronunciation, such as peculiarly distinguished one species of monks in the Roman Church, the Capuchins. But men may both snuffle and shake, and yet be meek, frugal, modest, just, and charitable. No one denies that this society of Primitives displayed an example of all those virtues. Penn saw that the English bishops and the Presbyterians had been the cause of a dreadful war on account of a surplice, lawn sleeves, and a liturgy. He would have neither liturgy, lawn, nor surplice. The apostles had none of them. Jesus Christ had baptized none. The associates of Penn declined baptism.