In the body of the pamphlet Needham maintains that principle.  “Christ left no such rules and directions,” he says, “nor was it his intention to leave such, for propagating the Gospel, as exclude the Magistrate from using his wisdom and endeavours in order thereunto.”  He defends the Commission of Triers and the Commission of Ejectors, and more than once twits Goodwin with having taken up at last the extreme crotchets of Roger Williams the American. “A Letter of Address to the Protector occasioned by Mr. Needham’s Reply to Mr. Goodwin’s Book against Triers” appeared Aug. 25; but we need not follow the controversy farther.  It had come to be Mr. John Goodwin’s fate to be the severest public critic of Cromwell’s Established Church; it had come to be Mr. Marchamont Needham’s to be the most prominent defender of that institution.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Thomason Pamphlets, and Catalogue of the same for dates.]

More likely than such men as John Goodwin to be classed as open revilers of the Established Church were the Quakers.  They were now very numerous, going about in England, Scotland, Ireland, and everywhere else, as before, and mingling denunciations of every form of the existing ministry with their softer and richer teachings.  They were still liable, of course, to varieties of penal treatment, according to the degrees of their aggressiveness and the moods of the local authorities; but the disposition at head-quarters was decidedly towards gentleness with them.  Hardly had the new Council of State been constituted when, Cromwell himself present, three of the most eminent London physicians, Dr. Wright, Dr. Cox, and Dr. Bates, were instructed “to visit James Nayler, prisoner in Bridewell, and to consider of his condition as to the state both of his mind and body in point of health”; and, from that date (July 16, 1657), his farther detention seems to have been merely for his cure.  George Fox, whose circuits of preaching took him as far as Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands, could never be in London without addressing a pious letter or two to Cromwell, or even going to see him; and another Quaker, Edward Burrough, was so drawn to Cromwell that he was continually penning letters to him and leaving them at Whitehall.  During and after the Kingship question these letters were particularly frequent, the Quakers being all Contrariants on that point.  “O Protector, who hast tasted of the power of God, which many generations before thee have not so much since the days of apostasy from the Apostles, take heed that thou lose not thy power; but keep Kingship off thy head, which the world would give to thee:”  so had Fox written in one letter, ending, “O Oliver, take heed of undoing thyself by running into things that will fade, the things of this world that will change; be subject and obedient to the Lord God.”  There was something in all this that really reached Cromwell’s heart, while it amused him; and, though he would begin