is discovered.

"But here take notice, That Common Freedom, which is the Rule I
would have practiced and not talked on, was thy pretence, but
particular Freedom to thyself was thy intent. Amend, or else thou
wilt be shamed, when Knowledge doth spread to cover the Earth, even
as the waters cover the Seas. And so Farewell.
J. W."

To-day knowledge is commencing "to spread to cover the Earth even as the
waters cover the Seas"; and the thinkers of our times are rapidly coming
to realise, to use Shelley's words, that--"The most fatal error that
ever happened in the world was the separation of political and ethical
science": a separation against which, as we have seen, Winstanley in his
time protested so vigorously. Hence it is, probably, that the teachings
of our modern seers and prophets, of the leaders and inspirers of the
advanced thought of to-day, of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and even of Henry
George, almost seem to us but as the echoes of those of their great
forerunner in the stirring days of the Commonwealth.

FOOTNOTES:

[163:1] _History of the Commonwealth_, vol. i. p. 446.

[163:2] _Ibid._ p. 471.

[164:1] King's Pamphlets. British Museum, Press Mark, E. 655. Also at
the Guildhall Library and the Bodleian.

[164:2] At the very time this book was being written, some of the new
settlements in America were making Church Fellowship a necessary
condition of civil rights.

[165:1] See Carlyle's _Letters and Speeches_, Speech II., Sept. 4th,
1654, part viii. p. 20.

[166:1] This argument would have appealed strongly to Cromwell, who, in
one of his Speeches to his First Parliament, said: "If I had not a hope
fixed in me that this cause and this business was of God, I would many
years ago have run from it. If it be of God, He will bear it up. If it
be of man, it will tumble; as everything that hath been of man since the
world began hath done. And what are all our Histories and other
Traditions of Actions in former times but God manifesting Himself, that
He hath shaken and tumbled down, and trampled upon everything that He
had not planted."--Carlyle, _Letters and Speeches_, part viii. p. 89.

[168:1] With this contention, too, Cromwell would have found himself in
complete sympathy. For "the truth of it is, There are wicked and
abominable laws which will be in your power to alter," he said to one of
his Parliaments on Sept. 17th, 1656.