Three Apostles of Quakerism: Popular Sketches of Fox, Penn and BarclayRhodes, Benjamin
History
Three Apostles of Quakerism: Popular Sketches of Fox, Penn and Barclay
Rhodes, Benjamin
Barclay, Robert, 1648-1690; Fox, George, 1624-1691; Penn, William, 1644-1718; Society of Friends
He sums up the charges against him thus:--"That I am a papist and some
will needs have me a Jesuite; that the access and interest I have been
thought to have had with the king is thereto ascribed; that I have
been a great caballer and councealor of those things that have been
done for the advancement of the Romish interest and agrieving of the
people: and thence have been a joint contriver with the Jesuit Peters
and others; and that for this I have received advantages and money
from the king, and so consequently am chargeable with the odium and
censure that such doings merit." To this he replies, that he has been
married eighteen years and has several children, which proves him no
Jesuit; that for twenty-two years he has been no Papist, "without being
under the least temptation to return to it again;" that he has always
avowed his opposition to those principles "in the opinion of some more
forwardly than prudently," when the catholic party was strong, "judging
it," he adds sarcastically, "a fitter season then than now to show zeal
for the Protestant religion." The only money ever paid to him from the
treasury is acknowledged in the published accounts, and so on. But
what is most daring is his charity towards the fallen monarch and his
Catholic friends in the hour of their unpopularity. "For I must confess
that the fatal stroaks the interest of the Church of Rome seems to have
gotten in these nations does not a whitt increase my aversion to their
religion, for that I judge truth and error is not rightly measured by
such events; and as to the persons of Roman Catholics, as it never
agreed with the notions I have of the Christian religion to hate these
persons, so their present misfortunes are so far from embittering my
spirit towards them that it rather increases tenderness and regard to
them, while I consider the ingenerous spirit of those who cannot take a
more effectual way to lessen the reputation of the Protestant religion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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