o take up arms against the king, and
that he would at no time "endeavour any alteration of government in
Church or State." In case of refusal he was forbidden to go within five
miles of any borough or of any place where he had been wont to
minister. As the main body of the Nonconformists belonged to the city
and trading classes, the effect of this measure was to rob them of any
religious teaching at all. But the tide of religious intolerance was now
slowly ebbing and, bigoted as the House was, a motion to impose the oath
of the Five Mile Act on every person in the nation was rejected in the
same session by a majority of six. The sufferings of the Nonconformists
indeed could hardly fail to tell on the sympathies of the people. The
thirst for revenge which had been roused by the tyranny of the
Presbyterians in their hour of triumph was satisfied by their
humiliation in their hour of defeat. The sight of pious and learned
clergymen driven from their homes and their flocks, of religious
meetings broken up by the constables, of preachers set side by side with
thieves and outcasts in the dock, of gaols crammed with honest
enthusiasts whose piety was their only crime, pleaded more eloquently
for toleration than all the reasoning in the world.

[Sidenote: Milton.]

We have a clue to the extent of the persecution from what we know to
have been its effect on a single sect. The Quakers had excited alarm by
their extravagances of manner as well as by their refusal to bear arms
or to take oaths, and a special Act was passed for their repression.
They were one of the smallest of the Nonconformist bodies, but more than
four thousand were soon in prison, and five hundred of these were
imprisoned in London alone. The king's Declaration of Indulgence twelve
years later set free twelve hundred Quakers who had found their way to
the gaols. For not only had persecution failed to kill religious
liberty, but the very Puritanism which the Cavalier Parliament believed
itself to have trodden under foot was at this moment proving the noble
life it had drawn from suffering and defeat. It was at this moment that
Milton produced the "Paradise Lost." During the Civil War he had been
engaged in strife with Presbyterians and with Royalists, pleading for
civil and religious freedom, for freedom of social life and freedom of
the press. At a later time he became Latin secretary to the Protector in
spite of a blindness which had been brought on by the int