wealth of the
Protectorate what theory of Toleration should be adopted into its
Constitution, whether the Parliament's or Cromwell's. For the ferment
of religious and irreligious speculation of all kinds in the three
nations was now something prodigious, and there were widely diffused
denominations of dissent and heresy that had not been in existence
ten years before, when the Long Parliament and the Westminster
Assembly first discussed the Toleration Question. Our synopsis of the
English sects and Heresies of 1644 (Vol. III. 143-159) is not,
indeed, wholly out of date for 1654, but it would require extensions
and modifications to adjust it accurately to the latter year. There
had been the natural flux and reflux of ideas during the intervening
decade, the waning of some sects and singularities that had no deep
root, the interblending of others, and new bursts in the teeming
chaos. _Atheists_, Sceptics_, _Mortalists_ or _Materialists_,
_Anti-Scripturists_, _Anti-Trinitarians_ or _Socinians_, _Arians_,
_Anti-Sabbatarians_, _Seekers_, and _Divorcers_ or _Miltonists_: all
these terms were still in the vocabulary of the orthodox, describing
persons or bodies of persons of whose opinions the Civil Magistrate
was bound to take account. Sects, on the other hand, that had been on
the black list ten years ago had now been admitted to respectability.
_Baptists_ or _Anabaptists_, _Antinomians, _Brownists_, nay even
INDEPENDENTS generally, had been regarded in 1644 as dark and
dangerous schismatics; but now, save in the private colloquies or
controversial tracts of Presbyterians, no feeling of horror attached
to those names. INDEPENDENTS, indeed, were now the Lords of the
Commonwealth, and _Anabaptists_ and _Antinomians_ were in high
places, so that the most orthodox Presbyterians found themselves side
by side with them in private gatherings and committees. In the
Established Church of the Protectorate there was to be a
comprehension of Presbyterians, Independents, and such Baptists and
other really Evangelical Sectaries as might be willing; and,
accordingly, the question of mere Toleration outside the Established
Church no longer concerned the Evangelical sects lying immediately
beyond ordinary Independency. If, from objection to the principle of
an Establishment, they chose to remain outside, they would have
toleration there as a matter of course. To make up, however, for this
removal of so many of the old Sectaries from all prac