great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout
Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and
not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is
sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the
seventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the
Catholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudices
of the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarian
ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian
charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of
its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal
toleration. The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papists
from the pale of their charity. With the single exception of the sect of
which William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete and
impartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes of
the English people. Hence it was that the very men whose liberties and
estates had been secured by the declaration, and who were thereby
permitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newly
acquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which had
opened their prison doors had also liberated the Papists and the Quakers.
Baxter's severe and painful spirit could not rejoice in an act which had,
indeed, restored him to personal freedom, but which had, in his view,
also offended Heaven, and strengthened the powers of Antichrist by
extending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters. Bunyan disliked the
Quakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction at
his release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by the
influence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince. Dissenters
forgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at the
hands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to the
declaration. They almost magnified into Christian confessors the
prelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plotted