without shocking a vast mass of prejudice; that they put an end,
at once and for ever, without one division in either House of
Parliament, without one riot in the streets, with scarcely one
audible murmur even from the classes most deeply tainted with
bigotry, to a persecution which had raged during four
generations, which had broken innumerable hearts, which had made
innumerable firesides desolate, which had filled the prisons with
men of whom the world was not worthy, which had driven thousands
of those honest, diligent and godfearing yeomen and artisans, who
are the true strength of a nation, to seek a refuge beyond the
ocean among the wigwams of red Indians and the lairs of panthers.
Such a defence, however weak it may appear to some shallow
speculators, will probably be thought complete by statesmen.

The English, in 1689, were by no means disposed to admit the
doctrine that religious error ought to be left unpunished. That
doctrine was just then more unpopular than it had ever been. For
it had, only a few months before, been hypocritically put forward
as a pretext for persecuting the Established Church, for
trampling on the fundamental laws of the realm, for confiscating
freeholds, for treating as a crime the modest exercise of the
right of petition. If a bill had then been drawn up granting
entire freedom of conscience to all Protestants, it may be
confidently affirmed that Nottingham would never have introduced
such a bill; that all the bishops, Burnet included, would have
voted against it; that it would have been denounced, Sunday after
Sunday, from ten thousand pulpits, as an insult to God and to all
Christian men, and as a license to the worst heretics and
blasphemers; that it would have been condemned almost as
vehemently by Bates and Baxter as by Ken and Sherlock; that it