But what of that Toleration of Dissent from the Established Church which he professed to be equally dear to him?  That Cromwell was faithful still to the principle of Liberty of Conscience, to the fullest extent of his past professions, there can be no doubt.  It may be more doubtful whether his past professions pledged him to a theory of Toleration as absolute as that which had been advocated eleven or twelve years before by Roger Williams and John Goodwin, and then adopted by the Army Independents generally, and which was still upheld by the main body of the Anabaptists.  The evidence, however, rather favours the idea that he had already been in sympathy even with this extreme theory of Toleration, and so that now, though he had bitterly disappointed his old Anabaptist associates by declaring himself for the Civil Magistrate’s Authority in matters of Religion, he still cherished the extreme theory of Toleration as it might be applied round about his Established Church.  In his heart, I believe, he was for persecuting nobody whatsoever, troubling nobody whatsoever, for mere religious heresy, even of the kinds he himself most abhorred.  But, though this might be his private ideal, his difficulties publicly and practically were enormous.  The other unlimited Tolerationists in England were Anabaptists and the like, detesting his Established Church as incompatible with true Toleration, and in league for battering it down.  Through the rest of the community there was but little voice for Toleration.  The frantic and idiotic stringency of the Presbyterians of 1644-6 was now, indeed, rather out of fashion, and a certain mild babble about a Limited Toleration was common in the public mouth.  But the old leaven was at work in many quarters; occasional pamphlets from the Presbyterian camp still wailed lamentably about “the effects of the present Toleration, especially as to the increase of Blasphemy and Damnable Errors;” and some Presbyterian booksellers had recently published A Second Beacon Fired, in which they insidiously tried to work upon the Lord Protector’s new Conservative and State-Church instincts; by denouncing the books of some leading Anabaptists and other heretics, hostile to his Government, and humbly adjuring him to “do what might be expected from Christian magistrates” in such flagrant cases.  In the late Parliament there had been much of this Presbyterian spirit, and it had been proved abundantly that the Protector’s idea of Toleration would have been voted down by the national representatives.  Then what a harassing definition of proper Christian Toleration had come even from Cromwell’s favourite Independents, Messrs. Owen and the rest, with their twenty fundamentals!  Add the difficulties arising from the nature of some of the current heresies themselves, as tending directly to the defamation of his government, the subversion of laws and institutions, and the disturbance of the peace.[1]