[Footnote 1:  Wood’s Ath.  III. 593-598; Commons Journals of dates.]

It was really of very great consequence to the Commonwealth 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  III. 143-159) is not, indeed, wholly out of date for 1654, but it would require extensions and modifications to adjust it accurately to the latter year.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 practical interest in the question on their own account, there were new religious denominations of such strange ways and tendencies, such unknown relations to anything hitherto recognised as Orthodoxy or as Heresy, that the poor Civil Magistrate, or even the coolest Abstract Tolerationist, in contemplating them, might well be puzzled.  The following is a list of the chief of these new Sects that had sprung up since 1644:—­