He continued in connection with it when the Quaker combination had extended itself by purchase over the whole Jersey peninsula, and he was a trusted counselor of the corporation, and the representative of its interests at court.
Thus there grew more and more distinct before his peculiarly adventurous and enterprising mind the vision of the immense possibilities, political, religious, and commercial, of American colonization.

With admirable business shrewdness combined with courtly tact, he canceled an otherwise hopeless debt from the crown in consideration of the concession to him of a domain of imperial wealth and dimensions, with practically unlimited rights of jurisdiction.

At once he put into exercise the advantages and opportunities which were united in him so as never before in the promoter of a like enterprise, and achieved a success speedy and splendid beyond all precedent.
The providential preparations for this great enterprise--"the Holy Experiment," as Penn delighted to call it--had been visibly in progress in England for not more than the third part of a century.

It was not the less divine for being wholly logical and natural, that, just when the Puritan Reformation culminated in the victory of the Commonwealth, the Quaker Reformation should suddenly break forth.

Puritanism was the last expression of that appeal from the church to the Scriptures, from existing traditions of Christianity to its authentic original documents, which is the essence of Protestantism.