a root of danger.  What if the Fifth-Monarchy men should make it part of their faith that the saints could accelerate the Fifth Monarchy, and that it was their duty to do so?  Then their tenet might have strange practical effects upon English politics.  Already, in the time of the Barebones Parliament, there had been warnings of this, the Fifth-Monarchy men there, or outside the Parliament, having distinguished themselves by an ultra-Republicanism which verged on Communism, and also by their zeal for pure Voluntaryism in Religion and the abolition of a paid Ministry and all express Church machinery.  The fact had not escaped Cromwell, and in his speech at the opening of the present Parliament he had taken notice of it.  In that very speech he had singled out for remark “the mistaken notion of the Fifth Monarchy.”  It was a notion, he admitted, held by many good and sincere men; nay it was a notion he honoured and could find a high meaning in.  “But for men, on this principle, to betitle themselves that they are the only men to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people, and determine of property and liberty and everything else,—­upon such a pretension as this:  truly they had need to give clear manifestations of God’s presence with them, before wise men will receive or submit to their conclusions.”  If they were notions only, he added, they were best left alone; for “notions will hurt none but those who have them.”  But, when the notions were turned into practice, and proposals were made for abrogation of Property and Magistracy to smooth the way for the Fifth Monarchy, then one must remember Jude’s precept as to the mode of dealing with the errors of good men.  “Of some have compassion,” Jude had said, “making a difference; others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Hearne’s Ductor Historicus, 1714 (for the old doctrine of the Four Monarchies); Thomason Pamphlets; Carlyle’s Cromwell, III. 24-27.—­The Fifth Monarchy notion was by no means an upstart oddity of thought among the English Puritans of the seventeenth century.  It was a tradition of the most scholarly thought of mediaeval theologians as to the duration and final collapse of the existing Cosmos; and it may be traced in the older imaginative literature of various European nations.  Thus the Scottish Sir David Lindsay’s long poem entitled Monarchy, or Ane Dialogue betwix Experience and one Courtier of the Miserable Estate of the World, the date of which is 1553, is a moralized sketch of the whole previous history of the world, according to the then accepted doctrine of the Four past Secular Monarchies, with a glance around at the Europe of Lindsay’s own time as already certainly in the dregs of “The Latter Days,” and an anticipation, as if with assured personal belief, of a glorious Fifth Monarchy, or miraculous reconstitution of the whole Universe into a new Heaven and Earth, to begin probably about the year 2000.]