But it is one thing to hold a principle vaguely or latently as implicated in a principle already avowed, and another thing to extricate the implied principle and kindle it, as on the top of a lighthouse, on its own account. It is found, accordingly, that the early English Separatists collectively were much slower in this matter than Brown himself had been. They wanted toleration for themselves, and perhaps a general mildness in the administration of religious affairs; but they could not rid themselves of the notion, held alike by all the established churches, whether Prelatic or Presbyterian, that it is the duty of the prince, or the civil power, in every state to promote true religion and suppress false. Passages which we have already had occasion to quote (Vol. II. 569, 570) from the writings of Barrowe, Greenwood, and even of the liberal Robinson, the father of Congregationalism proper, prove beyond all dispute that these chiefs of the Separatists and Semi-Separatists who followed Brown in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign and in the reign of James had not worked out Toleration into a perfect or definite tenet. They did want something that they called a Toleration; but it was a limited and ill-defined Toleration.--There was, however, _one_ body or band of Separatists in James's reign who had pushed farther ahead, and grasped the idea of Liberty of Conscience at its very utmost. Strangely enough, as it may seem at first sight, they were the Separatists of the most intense and schismatic type then known, the least conciliatory in their relations to other churches and communions. They were the poor and despised Anglo-Dutch Anabaptists who called John Smyth (Vol. II. 539,540) their leader. In a Confession, or Declaration of Faith, put forth in 1611 by the English Baptists in Amsterdam, just after the death of Smyth, this article occurs: "The magistrate is not to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, nor compel men to this or that form of religion; because Christ is the King and Lawgiver of the Church and Conscience." It is believed that this is the first expression of the absolute principle of Liberty of Conscience in the public articles of any body of Christians. Contact with the Dutch Arminians may have helped Smyth's people to a perception of it; and it certainly did not please the English Pædobaptist Independents of Holland when it appeared among them. Robinson, for example, objected to it, as he was bound to do by the views of the civil magistrate's power which he maintained. He attributed the invention of such an article to the common inability of ignorant men to distinguish between the use of an ordinance and its abuse. In other words, he thought the remnant of Smyth's Baptists had been rather silly in leaping to the conclusion that, because there had been much abuse of the interference of the civil power in matters of religion, and it had led to all sorts of horrors, there was nothing left but to set up the