Lastly, for Idolatry, who knows it not to be evidently against all Scripture, both of the Old and New Testament, and therefore a true heresy, or rather an impiety; wherein a right conscience can have naught to do, and the works thereof so manifest that a magistrate can hardly err in prohibiting and quite removing at least the public and scandalous use thereof." _Christ's unique act of Compulsion_:--"We read not that Christ ever exercised force but once; and that was to drive profane ones out of his Temple, not to force them in." _Concluding Recommendation to Statesmen and Ministers_:--"As to those magistrates who think it their work to settle Religion, and those ministers or others who so oft call upon them to do so, I trust that, having well considered what hath been here argued, neither _they_ will continue in that intention, nor _these_ in that expectation from them, when they shall find that the settlement of Religion belongs only to each particular church by persuasive and spiritual means within itself, and that the defence only of the Church belongs to the magistrate.

Had he once learnt not further to concern himself with Church affairs, half his labour might be spared and the Commonwealth better tended." * * * * * In this last extract there is a distinct outbreak of the intention which is rather covert through the rest of the tract.

To a hasty reader the tract might seem only a plea for the amplest toleration, of religious dissent, a plea for full liberty, outside of the Established Church, not merely to Baptists, but also to Quakers, Anti-Trinitarians, and all other sects professing in any way to be Christians and believers in the Bible, Papists alone excepted, and they but partially and reluctantly.

There would be no censure on Cromwell's policy, if that were all.

But an acute reader of the tract would have detected that more was intended in it than a plea for Toleration, that the very existence of any Established Church whatever was condemned.