Nor, though the Rumpers now refused to admit that, was sympathy with the demand wanting within their own body.

The majority of the Parliament and of its Council were, indeed, orthodox Independents or Semi-Presbyterians, approving of Cromwell's Church policy, and anxious to support the existing public ministry.

But Vane and some other leading Rumpers were men of mystic and extreme theological lights, pointing in the direction of Fifth-Monarchyism, Quakerism, and all other varieties of that fervency for Religion itself which would destroy mere state-paid machinery in its behalf, while a few, on the other hand, such as Neville, were cool freethinkers, contemptuous of Church and Clergy as but an apparatus for the prevalent superstition.

For the present, it had been thought impolitic perhaps to divide counsels in that matter, or to give offence to the sober majority of the people by reviving the question, so much agitated between 1649 and 1653, whether pure Republicanism in politics did not necessarily involve absolute Voluntaryism in Religion; but the probability is that the question was only adjourned.

In the connected question of Religious Toleration the new Government was more free at once to give effect to strong views; and, though it was not formally announced that unlimited Toleration was to be the rule of the Restored Republic, this was substantially the understanding.