The trouble thus caused resulted in Penn having several apoplectic fits, which left him thoroughly shattered. For six years he lingered in second childhood, lovingly nursed by his wife. The best account of his last days occurs in the Journal of Thomas Story, a distinguished Quaker minister, a scholar and a naturalist, whom he had made the first recorder of Philadelphia.
The end came very gently and peacefully. After the long and stormy voyage, the vessel came into harbour through unwonted calms and waters almost without a ripple. He was laid in his grave in Jordan's meeting-house beside his dearly loved Guli, and not far from his mother and Isaac Pennington. Many gathered there to pay the last honours. And since that day, the spot hallowed by his dust has been a well-visited shrine, where many have not only thought admiringly of his deeds, but have also thanked God for the grace that was in him.
If Macaulay was prejudiced against Penn, his testimony to his world-wide fame is the more reliable. We will quote it as it stands. "Rival nations and hostile sects have agreed in canonising him. England is proud of his name. A great commonwealth beyond the Atlantic regards him with a reverence similar to that which the Athenians felt for Theseus, and the Romans for Quirinus. The respected society of which he was a member honours him as an apostle. By pious men of other denominations he is usually regarded as a bright pattern of Christian virtue. Meanwhile admirers of a very different sort have sounded his praises. The French philosophers of the eighteenth century pardoned what they regarded as his superstitious fancies in consideration of his contempt for priests, and of his cosmopolitan benevolence, impartially extended to all races and to all creeds. His name has thus become, throughout all civilised countries, a synonym for probity and philanthropy."
"Nor is this reputation altogether unmerited. Penn was without doubt a man of eminent virtues. He had a strong sense of religious duty, and a fervent desire to promote the happiness of mankind. On one or two points of high importance he had notions more correct than were in his day common, even among men of enlarged minds; and as the proprietor and legislator of a province, which, being almost uninhabited when it came into his possession, afforded a clear field for moral experiments, he had the rare good fortune of being able to carry his theories into practice without any compromise, and yet without any shock to existing institutions. He will always be mentioned with honour as the founder of a Colony, who did not in his dealings with a savage people abuse the strength derived from civilisation, and as a law-giver who in an age of persecution, made religious liberty the corner-stone of a polity."