B PENN'S PURCHASE OF PENNSYLVANIA. After the Painting by Benjamin West, “Penn's Treaty." ENJAMIN WEST (1738-1820) was one of the most famous, if not the most famous, of the earlier American painters. He was born in Pennsylvania, October roth, 1738. After work as a portrait painter in American cities, he went abroad to study his art and finally settled in London, where he died March 11th, 1820. Besides "Penn's Treaty » he painted "Death on the Pale Horse," the "Death of Wolfe," and other famous historical studies. warmth of his charity, he contended for "freedom of conscience, even to Papists and Arminians, with security of civil peace to all," a doctrine that filled the Massachusetts clergy with horror and alarm. «He violently urged," says Cotton Mather, "that the civil magistrate might not punish breaches of the first table of commandments, which utterly took away from the authority all capacity to prevent the land which they had purchased on purpose for a recess from such things from becoming such a sink of abomination as would have been the reproach and ruin of Christianity in these parts of the world." In addition to these "most disturbant and offensive doctrines," Mather charges him with preaching against the Royal Charter of the colony, "on an insignificant pretense of wrong therein done unto the Indians." To his fervent zeal for liberty and opinion, this singular man united an equal degree of tenacity to every article of his own narrow creed. He objected to the custom of returning thanks after meat, as, in some manner or other, involving a corruption of primitive and pure worship; he refused to join any of the churches in Boston, unless they would first make a public and solemn declaration of their repentance for having formerly communed with the Church of England; and when his doctrines of religious liberty were condemned by the clergy, he wrote to his own church at Salem "that if they would not separate as well from the churches of New England as of Old, he would separate from them." All his peculiar opinions, whether true or erroneous, were alike offensive to his Puritan brethren, and controversy soon waxed warm. Some logicians, more tolerant or politic than the rest, attempted to reconcile the disputants by a whimsical, and not very intelligible, sophism. They approved not, said they, of persecuting men for conscience' sake, but solely for correcting them for sinning against conscience; and so not persecuting, but punishing heretics. Williams was not a man who could be imposed upon by words, or intimidated by threats; and he accordingly persevered in inculcating his doctrines publicly and vehemently. The clergy, after having in vain endeavored to shake him by argument and remonstrance, at last determined to call in the aid of the civil authority; and the general court, after due consideration of the case, passed sentence of banishment upon him, or, as they phrased it, "ordered his removal out of the jurisdiction of the court." Some of the men in power had |