d without wilful sin." But who
themselves were tolerant enough to be willing that "nevertheless the
public way of instructing the nation (_so it be not compulsive_) is
referred to their discretion."[32:1]

"So it be not compulsive!" in these words we have the key to the
position of the great body of sectarians known under the name of
Independents. They recognised, to use the words of their immortal
leader, that "it's one thing to love a brother, to bear with and love a
person of different judgement in matters of religion; and another thing
to have anybody so far set in the saddle on that account, as to have all
the rest of his brethren at mercy." So it be not compulsive! in these
words, too, we have the secret of their subsequent attitude toward the
Long Parliament and its successors. As Gardiner forcibly expresses
it--"Men who longed for religious toleration with a stern conviction
were impatient of parliamentary majorities working for uniformity." To
their opponents, more especially to those of the strict Presbyterian
school, toleration may have seemed of the devil, incompatible with
individual salvation, and injurious alike to Church and to State; to the
Independents, on the other hand, it was a necessary condition of
continued existence. They had no desire to establish a State Church of
their own; they were not prepared to deny that at least "a public way of
instructing the nation" might be necessary; but they were determined
that any such Church should be tolerant of the claims of men like
themselves, who could not conform their conscience to its requirements.
To create a home of liberty out of the England of the Tudors and the
Stuarts, of Laud and of Prynne, was a task beyond even their powers. But
whatever they may have failed to accomplish, they saved England from the
ecclesiastical tyranny Presbyterianism at that time involved, and raised
the standard of liberty and toleration, which during the great struggle
obtained a hold of the mind of the nation such as it never had before,
but never entirely lost again.

At the very outbreak of the Civil War, Cromwell's aim had been to find
"men who know what they fight for, and love what they know,--men as had
the fear of God before them, as made some conscience of what they
did."[33:1] Such men soon gathered round the great Independent, and he
moulded them into the famous Ironsides, by whose aid he turned the tide
of defeat at Marston Moor, and gained the glorious vict