- Cromwell’s reign was a brief experiment. His son was incompetent to continue it.
Puritanism had not won the heart of England, but prepared its own tomb by its excesses and blunders.
Royalty and Episcopacy, which struck their roots deep in the past, were restored with the powerful
aid of the Presbyterians. And now followed a reaction in favor of political and ecclesiastical
despotism, and public and private immorality, which for a time ruined all the good which Puritanism
had done.
Charles II., who "never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," broke his solemn
pledges and took the lead in intolerance and licentiousness. The Act of Uniformity was re-enacted
May 19, 1662, and went into operation on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1662, made hideous
by the St. Bartholomew Massacre, nearly a hundred years before. "And now came in," says Baxter,
one of the most moderate as well as most learned and pious of the Nonconformists, "the great
inundation of calamities, which in many streams overwhelmed thousands of godly Christians,
together with their pastors." All Puritan ministers were expelled from their livings and exposed to
starvation, their assemblies forbidden, and absolute obedience to the king and conformity to
episcopacy were enforced, even in Scotland. The faithful Presbyterians in that country (the
Covenanters) were subjected by the royal dragonnades to all manner of indignities and atrocities.
"They were hunted"—says an English historian^102 — like criminals over the mountains; their ears
were torn from their roots; they were branded with hot irons; their fingers were wrenched asunder
by the thumbkins; the bones of their legs were shattered in the boots; women were scourged publicly
through the streets; multitudes were transported to the Barbadoes; an infuriated soldiery was let
loose upon them, and encouraged to exercise all their ingenuity in torturing them."
The period of the Restoration is, perhaps, the most immoral and disgraceful in English
history. But it led at last to the final overthrow of the treacherous and semi-popish dynasty of the
Stuarts, and inaugurated a new era in the history of religious liberty. Puritanism was not dead, but
produced some of its best and most lasting works—Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress—in this period of its deepest humiliation and suffering.
- The act of Toleration under the reign of William and Mary, 1689, made an end to violent
persecutions in England. And yet it is far from what we now understand by religious liberty.
Toleration is negative, liberty positive; toleration is a favor, liberty a right; toleration may be
withdrawn by the power which grants it, liberty is as inalienable as conscience itself; toleration is
extended to what cannot be helped and what may be in itself objectionable, liberty is a priceless
gift of the Creator.
The Toleration of 1689 was an accommodation to a limited number of
Dissenters—Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and Quakers, who were allowed liberty of
separate organization and public worship on condition of subscribing thirty-six out of the Thirty-Nine
Articles of the Church of England. Roman Catholics and Unitarians were excluded, and did not
acquire toleration in England till the nineteenth century, the former by the Act of Emancipation
passed April 13, 1829. Even now the Dissenters in England labor under minor disabilities and social
disadvantages, which will continue as long as the government patronizes an established church.
They have to support the establishment, in addition to their own denomination. Practically, however,
(^102) Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, II., 48 (N. Y. ed.).