rather as Cromwell was always so energetic for a toleration of
Protestants in Catholic countries. "Although I have this set home to
my spirit," Cromwell wrote in reply, "I may not (shall I tell you I
_cannot_?) at this juncture of time, and as the face of my
affairs now stands, answer your call for Toleration. I say _I
cannot_, as to a public declaration of my sense in that point;
although I believe that under my government your Eminency, in behalf
of Catholics, has less reason for complaint, as to rigour on men's
consciences, than under the Parliament. For I have of some, and those
very many, had compassion; making a difference. Truly I have (and I
may speak it with cheerfulness in the presence of God, who is a
witness within me to the truth of what I affirm) made a difference;
and, as Jude speaks, 'plucked many out of the fire,'--the raging fire
of persecution, which did tyrannise over their consciences, and
encroached by an arbitrariness of power upon their estates. And
herein it is my purpose, as soon as I can remove impediments, and
some weights that press me down, to make a farther progress, and
discharge my promise to your Eminency in relation to that."[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle, III. 202-203. The letter is dated Dec. 26,
1656.]

(2) _The Episcopalians._ The question under this heading is not
about those moderate Episcopalian divines who had conformed so far as
to retain their rectories and vicarages in the Established Church,
but about those Episcopalians of stronger principle, whether High
Church and Arminian or not, who had been ejected from their former
livings, or were trying to maintain themselves by some kind of
private practice of their clerical profession in various parts of
England. Against these, just at the time when the Major-Generalcies
were coming into full operation, there did issue one fell Ordinance.
It was published Nov. 24, 1655, under the title of _An Ordinance
for Securing the Peace of the Commonwealth_, and it ordered that
after Jan. 1, 1655-6 no persons should keep in their houses as
chaplains or tutors any of the ejected clergy, and also that none of
the ejected should teach in schools, preach publicly or privately,
celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer,
under pain of being prosecuted. The Ordinance seems to have been
issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace
of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that
particul