]

[142] 'Seeing therefore,' infers Milton, the greatest of
England's patriots as well as poets, 'that no man, no synod,
no session of men, though called the Church, can judge
definitively the sense of Scripture to another man's
conscience, which is well known to be a maxim of the
Protestant religion; it follows plainly, that he who holds
in religion that belief or those opinions which to his
conscience and utmost understanding appear with most
evidence or probability in the Scripture, though to others
he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censured for a
heretic than his censurers, who do but the same thing
themselves, while they censure him for so doing.... To
Protestants therefore, whose common rule and touchstone is
the Scripture, nothing can with more conscience, more
equity, nothing more Protestantly can be permitted than a
free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference,
or disputation of what opinion soever disputable by
Scripture.... How many persecutions, then, imprisonments,
banishments, penalties, and stripes; how much bloodshed,
have the forcers of conscience to answer for--and
Protestants rather than Papists!' (_A Treatise of Civil
Power in Ecclesiastical Causes._) The reasons which induced
Milton to exclude the Catholics of his day from the general
toleration are more intelligible and more plausible, than
those of fifty or sixty years since, when the Rev. Sidney
Smith published the _Letters of Peter Plymley_.

[143] Displayed in the satire of _Hudibras_, particularly in
Part II. canto 3, Part III. 1, and the notes of Zachary Grey.
The author of this amusing political satire has exposed the
foibles of the great Puritan party with all the rancour of a
partisan.

That the strenuous antagonists of despotic dogmas, by whom the
principles of English liberty were first inaugurated, that they
should so fanatically abandon their reason to a monstrous idea,
is additional proof of the universality of superstitious
prejudice. But the conviction, the result of a continual
political religious persecution of their tenets, that if heaven
was on their side Satan and the powers of darkness were still
more inimical, cannot be fully understood unless by referring to
those scenes of murder and torture. Hunted with relentless
ferocity like wild beasts, holding conventicles and prayer
meetings with the sword suspended over their heads, it is not