But while each sect performed its rites in private, all assembled for public worship in a spacious temple, where the vast throng, clad in white, and grouped round a priest clothed in fair raiment wrought marvellously out of birds' plumage, joined in hymns and prayers so framed as to be acceptable to all.

The importance of this public devotion lay in the evidence it afforded that liberty of conscience could be combined with religious unity.
[Sidenote: Political Liberty] But even more important than More's defence of religious freedom was his firm maintenance of political liberty against the monarchy.

Steady and irresistible as was the growth of the royal power, it was far from seeming to the keenest political thinker of that day so natural and inevitable a developement of our history as it seems to some writers in our own.

In political hints which lie scattered over the whole of the Utopia More notes with a bitter irony the advance of the new despotism.

It was only in "Nowhere" that a sovereign was "removable on suspicion of a design to enslave his people." In England the work of slavery was being quietly wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law.