William Penn and Settlement in Colonial Pennsylvania
William Penn, a favorite of King Charles II in 1682 received ownership of Pennsylvania, which he tried to make a "holy experiment," by a union of temporal and spiritual matters. Pennsylvania made guarantees of religious freedom, and kept them, attracting many Quakers and others. Quakers took political control but were bitterly split on the funding of military operations or defenses; finally they relinquished political power. They created a second "holy experiment" by extensive involvement in voluntary benevolent associations while remaining apart from government. Programs of civic activism included building schools, hospitals and asylums for the entire city. Their new tone was an admonishing moralism born from a feeling of crisis. Even more extensive philanthropy was possible because of the wealth of the Quaker merchants based in Philadelphia.
The Friends had no ordained ministers and thus needed no seminaries for theological training. As a result they did not open any colleges in the colonial period, and did not join in founding the University of Pennsylvania. The major Quaker colleges were Haverford College (1833), Earlham College (1844), Swarthmore College (1864), and Bryn Mawr College (1885), all founded much later.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Quakers
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“So little time we live in Time,
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