penalties for the refusal of the engagement being inflicted. The parliament knew that the presbyterian pulpit was the most powerful lever of popular opinion in the country, and showed a magnanimous patience in dealing with it. It put out declarations, promising protection to the ministers in their benefices, and a maintenance of all ordinances that had been made for reformation in doctrine, worship, and discipline, except such as were penal and coercive. At last it passed an order that state affairs were not to be discussed in sermons, and appointed a committee to receive informations against such as disregarded it. The beneficed ministers, however, stimulated by missives from the Scotch kirk, now in arms for Charles II., continued, says the gentle Mrs. Hutchinson, to ‘spit fire out of their pulpits,’ and even the rout of their allies at Dunbar, though it made their tongues less dangerous, did not make them more smooth. The reason of the case is obvious. It is the true nemesis of human life that any spiritual impulse, not accompanied by clear comprehensive thought, is enslaved by its own realisation. Presbyterianism at the beginning of the war had been a struggling impulse, noble, but not understanding its own nobleness. It had now, with success, hardened into an interest; its inarticulate idea had become a shallow, though articulate formula; and it was seeking to suppress the spiritual force in which it had itself originated. The genuine commonwealth’s men, on the other hand, were still in the stage of the ‘unbodied thought.’ They announced principles. In practice the presbyterian clergy should be supported and well paid, but universal toleration must be maintained, and tithes were {333} declared judaic and objectionable. The offensiveness of such principles did more to provoke the clergy than the excellence of the practice, which Baxter, at least, was obliged to confess, did to conciliate them. The best illustration of the real feeling of the republican clique in London towards the preaching presbyterian royalists is to be found in Milton’s treatise on the ‘Tenure of kings and magistrates,’ written just at this crisis, when he was in constant communication with the chief commonwealth’s men.