William Penn wrote this discourse on the holy cross of Christ while imprisoned in the Tower of London, and it was later reprinted with substantial additions. The 1845 New York edition presents it in two parts: the first lays out the nature and discipline of the cross—self-denial and daily bearing it as the only way to God’s rest and kingdom—while the second gathers the living and dying testimonies of learned and virtuous persons, ancient and modern, in favor of the treatise. Part sermon, part moral anatomy, part anthology of witnesses, it is an expository work of seventeenth-century Quaker spirituality, moving from scriptural argument through a long indictment of Christendom’s corruption to a closing appeal for a religion of inward power rather than outward form.
“Christ’s Cross, is Christ’s way to Christ’s Crown.”
Penn’s central claim is stark and admits no hedging: whoever does not bear his cross cannot be Christ’s disciple. Since professed Christians plainly do not bear it, either the words of Luke must be denied or the generality of Christendom must be judged to deceive themselves miserably. From this premise the whole book unfolds as a diagnosis of how the cross was lost and a prescription for taking it up again.
From Primitive Purity to a Christendom in Disguise
The Book’s Frame and Penn’s Preface
The 1845 New York edition opens as a presentation copy from the Religious Society of Friends to the New York Public Library, dated January 1917. Its title page sets out the whole design: a discourse on the nature and discipline of the holy cross of Christ, asserting that self-denial and daily bearing that cross are the only way to God’s rest and kingdom, with testimonies appended from famous and learned persons ancient and modern. The epigraphs come from Luke 14:27 and 1 Timothy 4:7–8.
Penn’s Preface begins from first things: man’s great business is to answer the end for which he lives—to glorify God and save his soul. Instead, men despise inquiry into their own being and end, giving their days to pride, avarice and luxury as though self-created. The disease entered by disobedience to the law written in the heart. Penn urges the reader to retire into himself and view his soul’s condition by Christ’s light, since the soul’s loss is irreparable and God’s patience has a term. Christ’s grace teaches denial of worldly lusts; his leaven changes, his medicine cures, his touch still heals. The Crown requires the Cross. Penn notes the discourse was first written during his confinement in the Tower of London in 1668, and that God guided his feet into this path at about twenty-two, leading him out of the world’s pleasures. He prays his labour may turn Christians from envy and bitterness and unite them against the world, the flesh and the devil.
The Neglected Cross and Christendom’s Degeneracy
The first chapter opens with the necessity of the cross and Christians’ scant regard for it. Knowledge and obedience of the cross is of infinite moment, the only door to true Christianity, yet it is little understood and openly contradicted—so one must either deny Christ’s own words or conclude that the generality of Christendom miserably deceive themselves. Despite all the light of Christ’s coming, doctrine, miracles, death and resurrection, little of Christianity remains but the name, usurped by the old heathen nature. Unmortified Christians and heathens share one religion: the deity truly worshipped is the god of the world, lord of lusts—what to eat, drink, wear, how to gather wealth and enlarge territories. John names it the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. These lusts fill Christendom’s study and conversation; the world grows worse as it grows older, and professed Christians have fallen below the heathens, embittering infidels against the holy religion good example should have commended.
The Primitive Church and the Loss of the Cross
Penn sets the early believers against this decline. The light Satan cannot endure discovered him in every approach; inward obedience to it gave power to resist. Nothing went unexamined—every thought came to judgment before it was allowed room in the mind. The old heavens and earth passed away and all things became new. The glory of the cross shone so brightly through their self-denial that it shook heathen altars, discredited oracles, and led priests and generals in triumph; it quenched fire, daunted lions, convicted judges and converted executioners. No vain thought or idle word was permitted, no immodest look or gay apparel. They redeemed the time rather than sporting it away in balls, masks and gaming, choosing the afflictions of Christ’s pilgrims over the pleasures of sin.
From that portrait the reader may see what he is not and ought to be. The reason for the fall is the mind’s inward disregard of the light of Christ, which first showed and reproved sin. When that holy watch slackened, the enemy surprised the soul with temptations suited to its inclinations; holy fear decayed, love waxed cold, duty grew burdensome. Formality replaced the power of godliness, superstition replaced Christ’s institution, and a worldly, pompous worship with its priesthood, temple and altar was re-established. Religion fell from experience to tradition, worship from power to form, from life to letter—a by-rote formality of bowings, garments, perfumes and music, fitter for an earthly prince than the worship of the immortal God.
The Way of Faith and the Twofold Self
The way of God, Penn concludes, is a way of faith, dark to sense and mortal to self; only the obedient walk it, and those who do his will shall know his doctrine. There is no room for instruction where “lawful self” is lord rather than servant, and deliberating is ever worst, for the soul loses in parley. God requires nothing without giving ability to perform it. Penn begs those settled in temporal comforts to let the time past suffice and hearken to the still voice in conscience, which will divorce them from sin and give tranquillity no storm can shipwreck.
Pride Against the Gospel’s Simplicity
Penn presses the case that pride in false knowledge shut men out of the gospel. Christ himself thanked the Father for hiding its mysteries from the wise and prudent and revealing them to babes; the Athenians, swollen with their own learning, dismissed Paul’s preaching as vain babbling. Paul, though trained in the scholarship of his age, turns bitterly on that wisdom the Jews and Greeks prized—”Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world?”—and gives the reason: that no flesh should glory in God’s presence. The world by its wisdom knew not God, he says, so learning was a hindrance rather than a help; and to Timothy he leaves the charge to avoid profane babblings and the oppositions of science falsely so called. That was the mind of the apostolic age, when grace gave true knowledge and guided Christians.
Later Ages No Better Than the Jews
Did the centuries after fare any better? “Not one jot.” They outdid the Jews in pretensions to knowledge and in falling away from the Christian life. They had a nobler pattern—God speaking by his beloved Son, the express image of his substance, the perfection of meekness—and they seemed devoted to his name and to his apostles, but the respect was ceremonial. Zealous to garnish sepulchres and carve images, to keep relics and recommend a thousand fabulous things under that name, they degenerated in the weighty matters of the law: love, meekness, self-denial. They grew high-minded boasters, curious and contentious, perplexing the church with doubtful questions, drawing people into parties until they fell into blood, “as if they had been the worse for being once Christians.” Where Christ and the apostles taught men to love enemies and bless those who curse, these teachers, under colour of Christian zeal, set them to butcher one another; where they should have suffered their own blood for Jesus’ testimony, they shed the blood of his witnesses as heretics. The old serpent that beguiled Adam and the Jews had beguiled Christians too, by lying vanities, into slavery to the spirit that rules the disobedient.
Superstition, Cruelty, and the Clergy’s Ambition
As pride put Adam upon seeking a higher station than God gave him, and the Jews upon setting their post beside God’s and teaching their own traditions for doctrines—so that dissenters ran the hazard of “crucify, crucify”—so nominal Christians, from the same root, replaced spiritual worship with what is plainly ceremonious and worldly. Their perplexed councils and creeds end in “Conform, or burn.” This pride first perverted the spirituality of Christian worship, making it resemble the shadowy religion of the Jews and the gaudy worship of the Egyptians rather than the plain simplicity of Christ’s institution; then it spurred them on, through every imaginable cruelty, to maintain this great Diana of theirs. No meek supplication of those who kept to primitive purity could persuade them to forgo imposing their un-apostolical traditions. As ministers and bishops forsook the visitation of Christ’s flock and grew ambitious, covetous, and luxurious, resembling worldly potentates rather than humble followers of Jesus, so nearly every history tells with what pride and butchery they persecuted Christ’s holy members out of the world—and by anathemas sought to rob them of heaven besides. True Christians call these martyrs; the clergy styled them blasphemers and heretics, fulfilling Christ’s prophecy that men should think they did God service by killing them. These are the wolves the apostle foretold would rise out of the clergy itself and worry the flock after the great falling away. Where the clergy has held most power over princes and states, Penn concludes, there have been the most confusions, wrangles, bloodshed, sequestrations, imprisonments, and exiles; and the people are not converted but debauched, while the clergy chase larger benefices under pretence of spiritual promotion.
Honor All Men, but Not the Empty Hat
Turning to the customary ceremonies of honour, Penn cites “Honour all men, and love the brotherhood,” reasoning that love ranks above honour, which belongs to the brotherhood, while esteem is owed to all men as God’s creation and our own kind. David limits honour to the godly, and the righteous must slight the wicked. Honour falls under three capacities: obedience to superiors, love to equals, countenance and help to inferiors. Little of this appears in a poor empty hat, a bow, a cringe, or a gaudy title; the witness of God in every conscience should judge, not proud and self-seeking man. No such expression of honour is recommended by the Holy Ghost in scripture; these customs elude and equivocate, cheating people of due respect by giving nothing in the show of something.
The Testimony of Charron Against Covetousness
Penn turns to Peter Charron, the French moralist, who defines covetousness not merely as the love of riches but as every over-curious care and industry about them. The desire for goods, Charron argues, rests on opinion alone; the immoderate hunger for wealth is a gangrene in the soul that consumes natural affection, so that people forget parents, friends, and themselves for transitory trash—selling the horse to buy the hay. He calls it the base passion of vulgar fools who reckon riches the chief good and poverty the worst evil, weighing everything in a goldsmith’s balance when nature teaches us to measure by necessity. What greater folly, he asks, than to adore what nature buried under our feet as unworthy to be seen? In lands where gold grows, no worthwhile plant grows with it—a sign that where love of the metal takes root, no spark of honor or virtue survives. Riches serve wise men but command a fool; the covetous man serves his goods as one serves a fever that tyrannizes over him. It is vile to love what is not good, common to the wicked, and miserable to bind the living to the dead, tying the spirit to earth’s excrement with cords scripture calls thorns, snares of the devil, idolatry, and the root of all evil. Poverty wants many things, but covetousness all; the covetous man is good to none and worst to himself.
Cowley’s Two Kinds of Avarice
Abraham Cowley supplies the next witness, distinguishing a bastard avarice—a rapacious appetite for gain that exists only to be refunded through pride and luxury—from the true kind, a restless, insatiable desire of riches merely to hoard and increase them. The first is like a greedy ostrich devouring metal to digest and excrete it; the second like a foolish chough stealing money only to hide it. The first harms mankind and benefits few; the second benefits none, not even himself. The first can make no excuse to God or angels; the second can give no reason even to the Devil—a slave to Mammon without wages. Cowley cites Ovid: much is wanting to luxury, all to avarice. A wise man having nothing has all; the covetous man having all things has nothing. He wonders no law is made to manage such a man’s estate, as provision is made for madmen, and that we relieve idle vagrants while caring nothing for these really poor men.
Luxury Defined and Condemned
The discourse then turns to luxury, defined as an excessive indulgence of self in ease and pleasure—the last great impiety struck at in this treatise on the holy cross. It is epidemical and killing, creeping into every rank: the poorest exceed their ability to feed appetite, the rich wallow in the lusts of the eye and flesh and the pride of life, as careless of Jesus’ discipline as if luxury, not the cross, were the road to heaven. What shall we eat, drink, and wear—once the care of heathen—is now the study of pretended Christians. Sumptuous apparel, rich unguents, costly cookery, balls, masques, plays, and romances belong not to the path Jesus trod; through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom. Christ cannot benefit those who refuse to lay down their sins for love of him who laid down his life for them, nor give a place in heaven to those who refuse him any in their hearts on earth.
Luxury of the Belly
Jesus forbids taking thought of what to eat or drink, the thing the Gentiles seek; his disciples must seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and other things shall be added. This reproves the luxurious eater and drinker.
Apostolic Precepts on Adornment
The apostles’ precepts enforce the same self-denial. Paul would have women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, not with broidered hair, gold, pearls, or costly array—implying such things are immodest and that those who use them cannot be women professing godliness. Peter adds that the adorning should be the hidden man of the heart, a meek and quiet spirit of great price with God, and that holy women of old who trusted in God so adorned themselves. Paul further calls her that lives in pleasure dead while she lives, and bids Christians walk honestly, not in rioting and drunkenness, making no provision for the flesh. A footnote observes that not a word is said of men, as if this vanity belonged not to the sex.
Measuring the Land by These Precepts
Penn applies the measure to the inhabitants of the land who think themselves wronged if not accounted Christians, asking what proportion their life and spirit bear to these precepts.
The Spartan Discipline
Penn turns to Sparta, comparing his account with Xenophon’s. The Spartans ate sparingly and in common; the young were mixed with the old so that they might be awed and given good example. In walking they neither spoke nor turned their eyes aside, “any more than if they were statues of marble.” Men were bred bashful as women, silent at meals unless asked. At fifteen, instead of being left to their own conduct, the greatest care was taken of their conversation to preserve them from the mischiefs of that age; those who would not comply were not counted honest people. Their government held that no greater punishment existed for a bad man than to be known and used as such everywhere: such persons were barred from the company of persons of reputation, had to give place to all others, stand when others sat, be accountable to every honest man for their conversation, keep their poor kindred, and forgo the freedoms honest people might use—by which virtue was kept in credit and vice in contempt. They used necessities without superfluity or want, despising riches and sumptuous apparel, judging health the best ornament of the body and virtue of the mind. Xenophon is cited: since virtue and temperance render us commendable, and only the Lacedaemonians reverence it publicly and made it the foundation of their state, their government merits preference to any other; yet all admire it, none imitate it.
Lycurgus and the Laws of Iron
Lycurgus, their famous founder and lawgiver, instilled these principles and made them laws. Willing to reclaim citizens from a luxurious to a virtuous life, he introduced a new model of government, persuading them that though descended of noble ancestors, without exercise in virtue they would, like the dog in the kitchen, rather leap at the meat than run at the game. They agreed to obey him. He divided the land into equal portions, so the whole Laconic country seemed the lots of brethren—grieving the rich, rejoicing the poor. He rendered wealth useless by community, forbade gold and silver, made money of iron too base and heavy to make a thief, retrenched building laws (no more ornament than a hatchet and saw could make), and furniture like houses. This disbanded many trades: no merchant, cook, lawyer, flatterer, divine, or astrologer was found in Lacedaemonia. Injustice was banished by cutting up avarice’s root through community and useless gold and silver. To prevent luxury of tables, he ordained public eating places where all were publicly served; refusers were reputed voluptuous and reproved, if not corrected. He had virgins labor as young men, that their exercised bodies might be stronger and healthier when married, to bring forth children. He forbade portions, so none might sue for wealth but person and worth—the poor went off as well as the rich—and denied them ornaments that virtue might prefer them. He would not let young people marry till the flower of their age, that children might be strong. Chastity was so general that no law was made against adultery, believing where luxury and its arts were so severely forbidden it was needless. He forbade costly temple offerings that they might offer often, for God regards the heart, not the offering. While the Spartans kept these laws they were the first state of Greece, lasting about five hundred years. Remarkably, he would never suffer the laws to be written, to avoid barratry, and that judges might not be tied to the letter but left to circumstances of fact.
Cato and Scipio
The passage then turns to Roman instances. Cato, seeing a luxurious man loaden with flesh, asked what service such a man could be to himself or the commonwealth. Beholding statues erected to persons little worthy of remembrance, he said he had rather they should ask why they set not up a statue of Cato, than why they do. A man of severity of life, both example and judge, his competitors flattered the people; he cried out that the commonwealth’s distempers did not require flatterers to deceive them but physicians to cure them—which struck such awe that he was first chosen of them all. He lamented that the fine dames of Rome became governors to their husbands, saying it was strange that those who command the world should be subject to women. He thought judges who would not impartially punish malefactors greater criminals than the malefactors. He said it was better to lose a gift than a correction, for the one corrupts, the other instructs; that we ought not to separate honor from virtue; that no man is fit to command another who cannot command himself; that great men should be temperate in their power that they may keep it; that men too long in offices have too little regard to others or the state’s dignity; that they who do nothing will learn to do evil; that those raised by vices should gain credit by virtue.
The Bishop Who Ransomed the Captives
Acacius, bishop of Amida, stands first among the dying testimonies. When Roman soldiers refused to return some seven thousand starving captives to the king of Persia, Acacius gathered his clergy and argued that God, who neither eats nor drinks, has no need of the church’s gold and silver vessels. The jewels given by the faithful should be melted down to feed and redeem the captives and pay their passage home. He prevailed, and the charity did more to commend Christianity among unbelievers than any dispute or battle. The Persian king, a heathen, said the Romans sought to win adversaries by wars and favors alike, and asked to see the man whose religion taught such kindness to enemies. Penn turns the example against those who pity strangers while neglecting their own families, and against a Christendom that spends on the lust of the eye and the pride of life what should feed its own.
The Vanity of the World
Solomon, having tasted every worldly pleasure, pronounced it all vanity and vexation of spirit, and closed with the fear of God as the whole duty of man. Chilon the Greek, dying, repented of one act alone: as judge he had silently condemned a friend while persuading his colleagues to absolve him, and feared the persuasion itself was a kind of treachery—a tender conscience, Penn notes, though only a heathen’s. Ignatius, torn by beasts at Rome, left the saying that nothing is better than the peace of a good conscience, and that he now began to be a disciple, weighing neither visible nor invisible things that he might gain Christ. Justin Martyr, once a Cynic, was drawn to a strict life by the plain piety of simple Christians. Chrysostom taught that sacrificing soul and body to the Lord is the highest service, and that God promises mercy to the penitent but not time until tomorrow.
Emperors, Ministers, and Poets
Charles V, after twenty-three pitched battles and four conquered kingdoms, resigned his pomp and testified that the sincere practice of religion had joys and sweetness courts were strangers to. Montaigne kept death before him at every banquet, like the Egyptians who brought a skeleton to their feasts, and sought tranquillity by following reason and caring more what he was in himself than in others’ eyes. Cardinal Wolsey closed his life wishing he had served God as diligently as he pleased his king. Sir Philip Sidney repented of his Arcadia and would have burned it, bidding friends govern their wills by the word of their Creator and beholding in him the end of all the world’s vanities.
Cowley’s Solitude and Rochester’s Deathbed
Abraham Cowley, weary of courts and praise, retired to a cottage near Barn-Elms, his garden his pleasure and himself his gardener. He held that solitude requires first eradicating the lusts, that a wise man has more business in private than a statesman in public, and that the pleasantest condition is to live incognito, free of envy and ceremony—solitude like a modest wife, the world like a painted harlot. The Earl of Rochester, who had used his wit worse than almost anyone, came on his sickbed to believe in God, to adore the mercy he had treated with contempt, and to wish for more life only to repair the injuries he had done to religion. A young Howard, dying, bewailed his extravagance, tasted God’s forgiveness, warned his kindred to forsake the world’s pleasures, and yielded his soul willingly.
The Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine
The last memorial is Princess Elizabeth, whose virtue outshone her high birth. She chose single life for its freedom, her chief diversion plain housewifely knitting, and governed her small territory so well as to show fitness for a greater—sitting in judgment herself each week’s last day, tempering justice with mercy and remitting forfeitures where the party was poor. She kept no sumptuous table but spread the tables of the poor in their solitary cells, sending sealed tokens to needy subjects she had never seen. When a religious man at Hamburgh told her it was too great an honor for one of her quality to visit under his roof, she answered that if they were godly as well as great it would indeed be an honor—but if he knew what that greatness was as well as she, he would value it less.
The Cross as Inward Obedience
For Penn the cross is a figurative speech but a real work. It is not a relic to be venerated or a cell to be entered; it is the daily subjection of the soul to the light of Christ in conscience. The primitive Christians, he argues, kept so strict a guard upon the very wicket of the soul that every thought had to come to judgment and have its rise and tendency approved before it was allowed room in the mind. That inward watch—not any outward austerity—is what quenched fire, daunted lions, and converted executioners. His contempt for the recluse life follows from this: no outward cell can shut up the soul from lust, since evil comes from within, and a self-denial that destroys useful society and honest labor is lazy and unprofitable. The true Christian convent is within.
This inward principle governs his account of worship as well. God looks at the rise of the performance, not the duty; the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination, and even God’s own appointed forms, performed without his Spirit and the preparation of the heart, draw his abhorrence. Penn reads David’s waiting—”Lead me in thy truth and teach me; on thee do I wait all the day long”—as the model of true worship: an inward exercise, the soul touched and raised in heavenly desires, standing not in external forms but in divine aid. The silence of the holy cross, in which a person waits watchfully upon God with their own thoughts stilled, is the preparation no liturgy can supply.
Pride, Avarice, and Luxury: The Anatomy of Unlawful Self
The book’s long middle is a moral anatomy of what Penn calls unlawful self, twofold in religion and in morality, and of the three capital lusts that flow from it. Pride comes first: it craves knowledge and power, swells into love of honor and respect, and turns religion itself into a ladder for worldly preferment. His portrait of the proud minister is the sharpest writing in the book—the man who claims exemption by office, treats reproof from a layman as schism, and forgets that at best he is a steward and under-shepherd, not the heritage of God itself. Pride in power becomes tyranny; pride in knowledge made the Athenians despise Paul’s preaching and moved Christ to thank his Father for hiding the gospel’s mysteries from the wise and prudent and revealing them to babes.
Avarice and luxury complete the indictment. Penn borrows Peter Charron’s image of covetousness as a gangrene in the soul that consumes natural affection, and Abraham Cowley’s distinction between the rapacious avarice that spends and the hoarding avarice that does good to none, not even itself—”a slave to Mammon without wages.” Luxury he defines as an excessive indulgence of self in ease and pleasure, creeping into every rank, so that the poorest exceed their ability to feed appetite and the rich wallow in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Against all of it he sets the best recreation, which is to do good: diligence in one’s calling, visiting the sick and imprisoned, moderate study of useful arts, housewifely employments, and private retirement to enjoy the Lord.
The Quaker Testimonies and the Argument over “You”
Penn’s refusal of customary honors runs through several chapters and reaches its most distinctive ground in his case against the plural “you” to a single person. “Thou,” he argues, is the only proper word for one person in every language and in English law itself, where indictments still run in the singular. The plural was first ascribed in flattery to proud popes and emperors, imitating heathen homage to their gods, as though one pope were many gods and one emperor many men. Custom, he answers, rules only in things reasonable or indifferent; it can no more yoke One and You together than make a man a woman. He cites Luther mocking the incongruity, Erasmus devoting a discourse to it, and Howel’s history noting that peasants once “thou’d” their kings. The argument is deliberately ad hominem: it is extravagant pride for a mortal to require from a fellow creature more civil speech than he gives the immortal God, approaching God with “Thou” and “Thee” while scorning a Christian who gives him no better language than he just gave God.
The same spirit shapes his reading of Mordecai, who bowed not to Haman though the king had commanded it. Penn will not allow the evasion that Mordecai refused because Haman was uncircumcised; granting Mordecai a figure of Christ and the Jews of God’s people, the argument only strengthens: the spiritual circumcision are not to bow to the customs of the spiritual uncircumcision. Those who endure faithful in what they are convinced God requires, against the grain of the world and themselves, shall find blessed recompense—and Mordecai their captain will deliver them at last.
A Book of Witnesses
The second part of the work turns from argument to testimony, and its method is cumulative rather than systematic. Penn ranges through heathen philosophers and poets, sober matrons like Penelope and Cornelia, and Christian worthies, setting their sayings and deaths against the laxity of his own age. He traces the genealogy of the stage to Epicharmus and Thespis, notes that the Athenians once appointed officers to observe apparel and punish the immodest, and observes dryly that it is now punishable to reprove such things. The effect is a great cloud of witnesses, ancient and modern, called to show that the way he pleads for is no novelty but the practice of the wisest in every age—and that the pleasures of the world have always ended in shame and sorrow for those who gave them their souls.
The Seriousness of Dying Well
Penn’s argument closes where all his reasoning has been pointing: at death and judgment. He presses the reader to number their days and redeem their time, remembering they are stewards who must give account to an impartial judge. The tree falls as it lies, and as death leaves men judgment finds them. The final chapters turn to the way of living among the first Christians and to the dying testimonies of those who had borne the cross—evidence, in Penn’s design, that the crown is not a metaphor but a promised rest, and that those who have tasted the judgments and mercies of Christ and the frowns of the world have the better of it even here. The book ends not with argument but with witness, which is where Penn always meant it to end.
