ty and the clergy, no ceremony,
no institution, no vocation, no imposition of hands was, as in all
other churches, supposed requisite to convey a right to holy orders.
The enthusiasm of the Presbyterians led them to reject the authority
of prelates, to throw off the restraint of liturgies, to retrench
ceremonies, to limit the riches and authority of the priestly office:
the fanaticism of the Independents, exalted to a higher pitch, abolished
ecclesiastical government, disdained creeds and systems, neglected every
ceremony, and confounded all ranks and orders. The soldier, the
merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal, and guided by the
illapses of the spirit, resigned himself to an inward and superior
direction, and was consecrated, in a manner, by an immediate intercourse
and communication with heaven.

The Catholics, pretending to an infallible guide, had justified
upon that principle their doctrine and practice of persecution; the
Presbyterians, imagining that such clear and certain tenets as
they themselves adopted could be rejected only from a criminal and
pertinacious obstinacy, had hitherto gratified to the full their bigoted
zeal, in a like doctrine and practice: the Independents, from the
extremity of the same zeal, were led into the milder principles of
toleration. Their mind, set afloat in the wide sea of inspiration, could
confine itself within no certain limits; and the same variations in
which an enthusiast indulged himself, he was apt, by a natural train
of thinking, to permit in others. Of all Christian sects, this was the
first which, during its prosperity as well as its adversity, always
adopted the principle of toleration; and it is remarkable that so
reasonable a doctrine owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the
height of extravagance and fanaticism.

Popery and prelacy alone, whose genius seemed to tend towards
superstition, were treated by the Independents with rigor. The doctrines
too of fate or destiny were deemed by them essential to all religion.
In these rigid opinions the whole sectaries, amidst all their other
differences, unanimously concurred.

The political system of the Independents kept pace with their religious.
Not content with confining to very narrow limits the power of the crown,
and reducing the king to the rank of first magistrate, which was the
project of the Presbyterians, this sect, more ardent in the pursuit of
liberty, aspired to a total abolition of the