“What Liberty of Conscience can we then expect of others [even the good and great Queen Elizabeth, he has just said, had thought persecution necessary to preserve royal authority], far worse principled from, the cradle, trained up and governed by Popish and Spanish counsels, and on such depending hitherto for subsistence?  Especially, what can this last Parliament expect, who, having revived lately and published the Covenant, hare re-engaged themselves never to readmit Episcopacy?  Which no son of Charles returning but will most certainly bring back with him, if he regard the last and strictest charge of his father, to persevere in not the Doctrine only, but Government, of the Church of England, [and] not to neglect the speedy and effectual suppressing of Errors and Schisms,—­among which he accounted Presbytery one of the chief.  Or, if, notwithstanding that charge of his father, he submit to the Covenant, how will he keep faith to us with disobedience to him, or regard that faith given which must be founded on the breach of that last and solemnest paternal charge, and the reluctance, I may say the antipathy, which is in all kings against Presbyterian and Independent Discipline?”

Perhaps the most striking instance of omission in the new edition of matter that had appeared in the first is in the paragraph on the subject of Spiritual Liberty to which reference has been made at p. 653.  He retains in that paragraph nearly all that related to Liberty of Conscience generally, but he carefully removes the two or three sentences in which he had intimated his individual opinion that there could be no perfect Liberty of Conscience without abolition of Church Establishments and dissolution of every form of connexion between Church and State.  There was practical sagacity in this omission at the moment at which he was re-issuing his pamphlet.  It was no time then to be obtruding upon the public, or upon the Presbyterians that were flocking in to the new Parliament, his peculiar Disestablishment notion, however precious it might be to himself.  His real business was to stir up all, by any means, to the defence even yet of the Republican form of Government; in such an argument, addressed mainly to Presbyterians and other zealots for a State Church, the question of Disestablishment was rather to be avoided; nay, for himself, that question had faded into insignificance for the time in comparison with the vaster question whether the Republic should be preserved or the Stuarts brought back, and most willingly would he have been, assured of the preservation of the Republic even though a State Church should continue to be part and parcel of it, and the special battle of Disestablishment should have to be postponed.  To keep out the Stuarts, to rouse dread and disgust even yet at the idea that the Stuarts should return, was the single all-including possibility, or impossibility, for which he was now striving.  To this end it is that again and again