"What does my brother mean, Master Antony?" quoth Aunt Dorothy, when she came to this passage. "And what doth General Cromwell mean? 'No compulsion!' and 'light and reason!' Most dangerous words. An assembly of godly divines at Westminster to settle everything! That is precisely what we have been fighting for. Not for disorder; not for each man to think what is right in his own judgment, and do what is right in his own eyes. But for those who believe right to have the power to instruct, or else to silence, those who believe wrong. Light and reason indeed! The cry of all the heretics from the beginning. Why, reason is the very source of all error. And light is precisely what we lack, and what the Westminster Assembly is providing for us; and when they have just kindled it, and set it up like a city on a hill, does Mr. Cromwell, forsooth, think we are going to let every tinker and tailor kindle his farthing candle instead, and lead people into any wilderness he pleases?" Said Dr. Antony,-- "There was a great light enkindled and set up on a Sorrowful Hill sixteen hundred years ago. But it has only enlightened the hearts of those who would look at it. And if the Sun does not put out these poor farthing candles, Mistress Dorothy, I am afraid we shall find it a hard matter to do so with our fingers." "Well," said Aunt Dorothy, "I am sure I cannot see whither things are tending." And even Aunt Gretel remarked,-- "That Independents and Presbyterians should agree might indeed be easy enough. But Lutherans and Calvinists are quite another question. In the next world--well, it is to be hoped. Death works miracles. But in this, scarcely. The dear brother-in-law is one of the wisest of men. But it cannot be expected that the wisest Englishman should quite fathom the religious differences of Germany." Of toleration towards Papists, Infidels, or Quakers, no one dreamed. Infidelity, all admitted, comes direct from the devil, and, of course, no Christian should tolerate the devil or his works. The Papists had within the memory of our older men sent fetters to bind us, and fagots to burn us in the Armada, which the winds of God scattered from our coasts. In France they had massacred our brethren in cold-blood to the number of one hundred thousand in the slaughter which began on St. Bartholomew's day. They had assassinated our kindred by tens of thousands in Ireland in our own times. And they were binding, and burning, and torturing, and making galley-slaves of our brethren still on the Continent of Europe. Not as heretics we kept them under, but as rebels. And as to the Quakers, they were reported to be liable to attacks of objections to clothes very perplexing to sober-minded Christians, and were probably many of them lunatics. These should not indeed be burned, but they should at all events be clothed, and, if possible, silenced, until they came to their right mind.