First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the deep sea of Puritanism. Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome) were forever clamoring for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of the pope. Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away in a little corner of the Swiss mountains. But that was not all. The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland and their Scottish subjects, when it came to religion, knew exactly what they wanted. And so thoroughly were they convinced that they themselves were right that they were firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They thought it wicked that other denominations should be suffered to exist and to worship freely within the confines of their own Protestant land. And they insisted not only that all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the British Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians, in short all those who did not share their own views upon the existence of a living God, be hanged. This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected result. It forced the men who were obliged to keep peace between those mutually hostile parties to be much more tolerant than they would have been otherwise. If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of their careers insisted upon equal rights for all denominations, and history tells us they did, they were most certainly not animated by a love for Presbyterians or High Churchmen, or vice versa. They were merely making the best of a very difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened in the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect finally became all powerful, show us what would have been the fate of England if any one of the many contending factions had been able to establish an absolute dictatorship over the entire country. Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able to do as he liked. But the Lord Protector was a very wise man. He knew that he ruled by the grace of his iron brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct or of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make common cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning tolerance did not go. As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned Socinians and Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles of the divine right of the individual human being, their lives were just as difficult as before.