Would not the restored Republican Parliament and their Councils of State see it to be part of their duty to assert at last the principle of absolute Religious Voluntaryism?
[Footnote 1: Commons Journals, May 19, 1659.] This representation of Milton's position at the time of the restoration of the Rump is confirmed by a private letter then addressed to him.

The writer was a certain Moses Wall, of Causham or Caversham in Oxfordshire, a scholar and Republican opinionist of whom there are traces in Hartlib's correspondence and elsewhere.[1] Milton had recently written to him, sending him perhaps a copy of his _Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes_; and this is Wall's reply--written, it will be observed, the very day after Richard's abdication:-- [Footnote 1: Worthington's Diary and Correspondence, by Crossley, I.
355 and 365.] "Sir, "I received yours the day after you wrote, and do humbly thank you that you are pleased to honour me with your letters.

I confess I have (even in my privacy in the country) oft had thoughts about you, and that with much respect for your friendliness to truth in your early years and in bad times.

But I was uncertain whether your relation to the Court (though I think that a Commonwealth was more friendly to you than a Court) had not clouded your former light; but your last book resolved that doubt.
"You complain of the non-progressency of the nation, and of its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths.

It is much to be bewailed; but, yet, let us pity human frailty.