All
children were to be taught a useful trade. Oaths in judicial
proceedings were not required. All prisons were to be workhouses
and places of reformation instead of dungeons of dirt, idleness,
and disease. This attempt to improve the prisons inaugurated a
movement of great importance in the modern world in which the
part played by the Quakers is too often forgotten.
Penn had now started his "Holy Experiment," as he called his
enterprise in Pennsylvania, by which he intended to prove that
religious liberty was not only right, but that agriculture,
commerce, and all arts and refinements of life would flourish
under it. He would break the delusion that prosperity and morals
were possible only under some one particular faith established by
law. He, would prove that government could be carried on without
war and without oaths, and that primitive Christianity could be
maintained without a hireling ministry, without persecution,
without ridiculous dogmas or ritual, sustained only by its own
innate power and the inward light.
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