to be the only Christian heresy; Papists were, in any case, enemies of the State, and also enemies of God because of their idolatry.
Milton's early defence of toleration on such comprehensive grounds shows his real greatness of character and elevation of mind. For it was written when the civil war seemed to be turning out well for the king, and when the Independent party had not, to any extent, emerged. The Puritan party of rebellion against the existing order had risen almost in the cause of intolerance. The great stumbling block to the Puritans under James I. had been his endeavour to obtain toleration for Catholics, connected as it was with his Spanish diplomacy and the abandonment of his Protestant son-in-law in Germany.[1] His very first Parliament in 1604, the year before the Gunpowder Plot, urged him to persecute Catholics. Laud's methods may have been largely inspired with the idea of upholding ecclesiastical authority as the bulwark of political despotism, but they were also retaliatory and keenly provoked by Puritan aggression. Nor would they have ceased to exist but for the Scottish Presbyterians, who began the war against Charles in 1638, and came in 1644 to the aid of the Parliamentarians, whose forces would otherwise in all probability have had to yield owing to the amateur nature of their
- ↑ Roger Williams appeals in his book to James I's words on toleration, chapter lxii.
