countries.  “Although I have this set home to my spirit,” Cromwell wrote in reply, “I may not (shall I tell you I cannot?) at this juncture of time, and as the face of my affairs now stands, answer your call for Toleration.  I say I cannot, as to a public declaration of my sense in that point; although I believe that under my government your Eminency, in behalf of Catholics, has less reason for complaint, as to rigour on men’s consciences, than under the Parliament.  For I have of some, and those very many, had compassion; making a difference.  Truly I have (and I may speak it with cheerfulness in the presence of God, who is a witness within me to the truth of what I affirm) made a difference; and, as Jude speaks, ’plucked many out of the fire,’—­the raging fire of persecution, which did tyrannise over their consciences, and encroached by an arbitrariness of power upon their estates.  And herein it is my purpose, as soon as I can remove impediments, and some weights that press me down, to make a farther progress, and discharge my promise to your Eminency in relation to that."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Carlyle, III. 202-203.  The letter is dated Dec. 26, 1656.]

(2) The Episcopalians. The question under this heading is not about those moderate Episcopalian divines who had conformed so far as to retain their rectories and vicarages in the Established Church, but about those Episcopalians of stronger principle, whether High Church and Arminian or not, who had been ejected from their former livings, or were trying to maintain themselves by some kind of private practice of their clerical profession in various parts of England.  Against these, just at the time when the Major-Generalcies were coming into full operation, there did issue one fell Ordinance.  It was published Nov. 24, 1655, under the title of An Ordinance for Securing the Peace of the Commonwealth, and it ordered that after Jan. 1, 1655-6 no persons should keep in their houses as chaplains or tutors any of the ejected clergy, and also that none of the ejected should teach in schools, preach publicly or privately, celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer, under pain of being prosecuted.  The Ordinance seems to have been issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that particular time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther plottings.  At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance itself that there would be great delicacy in the application of it, so as to favour such of the ejected as deserved tender treatment; and, in fact, it was never applied or executed at all.  No one was prosecuted under it; and, though it was not recalled, it was understood that it was suspended by the pleasure of his Highness, and that chaplains, teachers, and preachers, of the Episcopal persuasion, might go on as before, and reckon on all the toleration