be held as a condition of toleration. Freedom is limited to those who "profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, His eternal Son, the true God, and in the Holy Spirit, God, co-equal with the Father and the Son, one God blessed for ever; and do acknowledge the holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the revealed will and word of God; and shall in other things differ in doctrine, worship, or discipline from the public profession held forth." The determination to draw a broad and distinct line between clergy and laity--which was expressed in the resolutions of the first Protectorate Parliament, when the Articles of 1653 came under discussion--is decidedly taken up by this second Parliament, and incorporated in their Advice. [Sidenote: 1657, May.] [Sidenote: _Cromwell's Speech._] This comparison of the two Charters indicates a revived spirit of ecclesiastical conservatism at the period when the second of them was prepared, and seems to point to a strong Presbyterian element in this second Protectorate Parliament. The exclusion of members with republican predilections from seats in St. Stephen's left the Presbyterians more at liberty to carry out their own plan of religious policy; and it is a fact, that at the same time, they derived encouragement from the conciliatory conduct then, and for some little while before, manifested toward them by the Lord Protector. Cromwell accepted the Petition and Advice, "hugely taken," as he says, with the word "_settlement_--both with the thing and the notion"--it being the haven into which he had long sought, in a night of storms, to bring the vessel of Church and State. But, in a speech on the 21st of April, he could not help animadverting on debates in Parliament respecting the civil disqualification of public preachers. "I must say to you," he observed, "in behalf of our army--in the next place to their fighting--_they_ have been very good 'preachers,' and I should be sorry they should be excluded from serving the Commonwealth because they have been accustomed to 'preach' to their troops, companies, and regiments--which I think has been one of the blessings upon them, to the carrying on of the great work. I think you do not mean so 'that they should be excluded' but I tender it to you, that if you think fit there may be a consideration had of it. There may be some of us, it may be, who have been a little guilty of that, (the Lord Protector no doubt here thought of himself), who would be loth to be excluded from sitting in Parliament 'on account of it!'"[139] [Sidenote: 1657, April.]