Fox lived long enough to see a considerable relaxation in the severity of the penal laws against Nonconformists, and the dawn of more peaceful times. After the accession of James II., the condition of the Quakers was much improved, the King permitting them to substitute an affirmation for the oath, when one of the chief causes of persecution was removed. William Penn, too, was high in favour at Court at this time; he had opened an asylum for the Friends in his new State of Pennsylvania, and, enjoying the personal favour of the King and the chief officers of the State, he won the means of securing further toleration for his co-religionists. Then followed the peaceful revolution which placed William of Orange upon the throne of England, when the rights of conscience were still more fully recognised, and the Act of Toleration put an end to the miseries and persecutions the Friends had so long been subjected to. If the Church was too severe in the punishments she awarded to her truant children, and oftentimes provoked them by her harshness to forsake the sanctuary and wander forth until new tabernacles sprang up in the wilderness of the world, it cannot be said that Quakers fared better under the sway of the Presbyterians or the rule of the Protectorate, for Puritanism itself was then a grinding social tyranny, too strict in its discipline, too little regardful of human weaknesses, and too fully persuaded that there could be no truth or godliness outside its own conceptions. Unfortunately for themselves, the Quakers were accounted a distinct community, with whom neither Episcopalians nor Protestant Dissenters had any legal or religious connection. The religious mind of the nation was entrenched within what it persuaded itself were the limits of Christianity, and the new sect which had sprung up was declared to be beyond the pale. The bitterness of spirit with which the disciples of Fox were regarded may be gathered from the resolution passed by the delegates and ministers of the Congregational churches in London who assembled on the occasion of the abdication of Richard Cromwell. They then declared, among other things, that while "we greatly prize our Christian liberties, yet we profess our utter dislike and abhorrence of a universal toleration, as being contrary to the mind of God in his word.... It is our desire that countenance be not given, or trust reposed in, the hands of the Quakers, they being persons of such principles as are destructive to the Gospel, and inconsistent with the peace of civil societies." It was a persecuting age, and not on one side alone of the great civil strife of the 17th century does the stigma of bigotry and intolerance remain; happily, out of the weakness, the foulness, and the darkness of those times, the nation, the Church, and the people have emerged with a strong hold on better things, the ascetic piety of the Puritan and the breadth of view of