trange creature, immediately to present it to the Prince:
whereupon I, having taken one of the strangest that (I think) any
part of your Highness's dominions hath these many years produced, do,
with all submissiveness, make bold to present him, bound hand and
foot with his own cords (as I ought to bring him), to your Highness.
He need not be sent to the Tower for his mischievousness: there is no
danger in him now, nor like to be henceforth, as I have handled him."
In a prefixed Epistle to the Reader there is a good deal of
scurrility against Goodwin. He is described as "worse than a common
nuisance." He is taxed also with inconsistency, inasmuch as he had
been one of those who, in Feb. 1651-2, had signed the famous
_Proposals of Certain Ministers to the Committee for the
Propagation of the Gospel_, in which the principle of an
Established Church had been assumed and asserted (ante, IV. 392). In
the body of the pamphlet Needham maintains that principle. "Christ
left no such rules and directions," he says, "nor was it his
intention to leave such, for propagating the Gospel, as exclude the
Magistrate from using his wisdom and endeavours in order thereunto."
He defends the Commission of Triers and the Commission of Ejectors,
and more than once twits Goodwin with having taken up at last the
extreme crotchets of Roger Williams the American. "_A Letter of
Address to the Protector occasioned by Mr. Needham's Reply to Mr.
Goodwin's Book against Triers_" appeared Aug. 25; but we need not
follow the controversy farther. It had come to be Mr. John Goodwin's
fate to be the severest public critic of Cromwell's Established
Church; it had come to be Mr. Marchamont Needham's to be the most
prominent defender of that institution.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thomason Pamphlets, and Catalogue of the same for
dates.]

More likely than such men as John Goodwin to be classed as open
revilers of the Established Church were the Quakers. They were now
very numerous, going about in England, Scotland, Ireland, and
everywhere else, as before, and mingling denunciations of every form
of the existing ministry with their softer and richer teachings. They
were still liable, of course, to varieties of penal treatment,
according to the degrees of their aggressiveness and the moods of the
local authorities; but the disposition at head-quarters was decidedly
towards gentleness with them. Hardly had the new Council of State
been constituted when, Cromwell himself p