did what all have done who have attempted to impose a creed on men.

The real grievance has never been that an observance has been required, or
an indulgence refused, but that the right to think has been denied.
Provided a boundary be fixed within which the reason must be chained, the
line drawn by Laud is as reasonable as that of Calvin; Geneva is no more
infallible than Canterbury or Rome. Comprehension is the dream of
visionaries, for some will always differ from any confession of faith,
however broad; and where there are dogmas there will be heretics till all
have perished. But in their fear and hatred of individual free thought
regarding the mysteries of religion, Laud, Calvin, and the Pope agreed.

With the progress of the war, the Puritans, who had at first been united
in their opposition to the crown, themselves divided; one party, to which
most of the peers and of the non-conforming clergy belonged, being anxious
to reestablish the monarchy, and set up a rigid Presbyterianism; the
other, of whose spirit Cromwell was the incarnation, resolving each day
more firmly to crush the king and proclaim freedom of conscience; and it
was this doctrine of toleration which was the snare and the abomination in
the eyes of evangelical divines.

Robert Baillie, the Scotch commissioner, while in London, anxiously
watching the rise of the power of the Independents in Parliament, with
each victory of their armies in the field wrote, "Liberty of conscience,
and toleration of all and any religion, is so prodigious an impiety that
this religious parliament cannot but abhor the very meaning of it." Nor
did his reverend brethren of the Westminster Assembly fall any whit behind
him when they rose to expound the word. In a letter of 17th May, 1644, he
thus described their doctrine: "This day was the best that I have seen
since I came to England.... After D. Twisse had begun with a brief prayer,