That the Royalists had religious ideals of their own was a provocation which made it easy to deny them the toleration which they had hitherto virtually enjoyed. The familiar cadences of the Book of Common Prayer had become to them a symbol of political as well as of religious faith, whilst the voice of the often long-winded, and sometimes irrelevant ejaculator of prayers of his own conception, stood for them as the embodiment of the forces which had conspired to murder their king, to deprive them of the broad acres sold to satisfy the demands of sequestrators, and to exclude them from all share in the public interests of the country which they loved as devotedly as any Puritan could possibly do. It was now that Oliver committed the mistake--which thousands of others in like circumstances have committed--of confounding the symbol with the cause. The use of the Common Prayer Book was proscribed as thoroughly as the mass. Noblemen and gentlemen were prohibited from entertaining the ejected clergy of their own Church as chaplains or tutors of their children. Yet, after all, the persecution was sharp only for a time, and not only was the inquisition into the religious practices of domestic life soon abandoned, but the Episcopalian clergy were led to understand that no harm should befall them so long as they abstained from thrusting themselves upon the notice of the public. It was not only in relation to religious toleration that Oliver was driven by his position to modify his earlier principles. At one time he had fully sympathised with the Independent party in its efforts to secure the liberty of the press. Of libels on his own character and person he had been widely tolerant. Step by step the Long Parliament had imposed restrictions on the press, and these restrictions were continued under the Protectorate. At last, in October 1655, the final blow fell. Only two weekly newspapers were permitted to appear, and both these newspapers were to be edited by an agent of the Government. Milton, now incapacitated by blindness from active employment in the service of the State, must have winced at hearing that his chosen hero, who had long ago turned his back on a voluntary system of Church-government, had now turned his back on the central doctrine of the Areopagitica. Oliver, we may be sure, took all these proceedings as a matter of course. He held himself to have been placed in the seat of authority not to advance the most beneficent theories, but to keep order after the fashion of a constable in a discordant world. Neither Milton nor himself believed in the political rights of majorities. If the nation chose to raise itself up against the cause of God, so much the worse for the nation. "I say," he had announced to his first Parliament, "that the wilful throwing away of this government--so owned by God, so approved by men, so testified to in the fundamentals of it--and that in relation to the good of these nations and posterity;