er did collectively, and such
individuals were acting conformably to the logic of the system. In
the Petition of 1616 they say, "We deny also a national, a provincial,
and diocesan church under the Gospel to be a true, visible, political
church." John Robinson writes: "It is the Church of England, or State
Ecclesiastical, which we account Babylon, and from which we withdraw
in spiritual communion." In 1644 we are told: "Godwin is a bitter
enemy to presbytery, and is openly for a full liberty of conscience,
to all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists." The author of the tract,
"What the Independents would have", writes that he thinks it a sin
either to follow an erring conscience or to go against it; but to
oppose it the greater sin, for he that will do the least sin against
conscience is prepared in disposition to do the greatest. Therefore
he reckons liberty of conscience to be England's chiefest good.

When I said that the English exiles in Holland came in contact with
the most spiritual remnant of the Reformers, I meant the German
Anabaptists. The English Baptists and the Quakers were as much
opposed to the principle of persecution as the Independents I have
quoted.

Only two conditions were imposed on Charles II before he came over.
One of these was liberty of conscience. Cromwell had died without
leaving behind him an established Constitution, and his lieutenants
succeeded no better than his son. The army refused to obey a
parliament of their own creating, the remnant which remained when
Pride expelled the majority. It was a parliament founded not on law
but on violence, on the act of men thirsting for the king's blood. The
simplest solution was to restore the Long Parliament, to give power to
the Presbyterian majority, which had been excluded, and was not
responsible for the miscarriages and the constitutional instability of
the last eleven years. The idea was so obvious that it occurred to
everybody--to Monk in Scotland, to Fairfax at York, and to the army
which Lambert collected to meet Monk at Newcastle, and which dispersed
without fighting for its own imperial supremacy.

It is worth while to study, in the second volume of Guizot's "Richard
Cromwell", the consummate policy with which Monk prepared the desired
result. For the recall of the excluded members was the restoration to
power of men who had persisted in negotiating with Charles I, of men
who had been Royalists in season and out of season. T