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Would the Tolerationists, and especially the Limited Tolerationists, take a survey of this chaos, and consider how their principle of Toleration would work when applied to its ghastly bulk and variety? This matter, of the extraordinary multiplication of Sects and Heresies in England, had been in constant public discussion since the opening of the Long Parliament.
Here, I believe, they represented the mass of the ordinary Independents. Whatever more a few strong spirits among the Independents, and especially among the lay Independents, desired, the mass of them were content for the present to be Limited Tolerationists. Such were the three forms of the Toleration Doctrine in England in 1644.
He did not formally demand unlimited toleration, and indeed conceded something in words to the effect that in cases of "known heresy, or blasphemy, or idolatry," offenders would have to be "obnoxious to the Civil Power;" but I rather think that the concession was prudential, and that his heart did not go with it. I will retain him therefore among the Unlimited Tolerationists.
Elisha Phelps, Gideon Tomlinson, James Stevens, Orange Merwin, and Daniel Burrows were afterwards elected to that office, while Gideon Tomlinson and John S. Peters became in turn governors of the state. Among the delegates, there were nearly a dozen well-known physicians, most of them to be found among the Tolerationists. Messrs.
Nevertheless it was the loyalty of the Federal members of the convention that won the small majority for the Tolerationists and for the new constitution, even if that loyalty was founded upon the belief, held by many, that the choice of evils lay in voting for the new regime. The constitution of 1818 was modeled on the old charter, and retained much that was useful in the earlier instrument.
They had never liked the Army of the New Model; all its victories had not reconciled them to it, or made them cease to regret the Army of the Old Model, That had been a respectable army, with the Earl of Essex at its head; this was an army of Independents, Sectaries, Tolerationists.
The committees to which parts of the governor's speech had been referred for consideration did little. The mixed committee, including several Tolerationists and having an Episcopal chairman, that was to report upon the religious situation, gave no encouragement to dissenters.
What they had thus expressed in print they had continued to express in speech and in every other possible way. They were, in a certain sense, the most marked Tolerationists of the time; Toleration was identified with them. And yet it was but a limited Toleration, a very limited Toleration, that they demanded.
In the fall of 1817, the reform party had forced the repeal of the obnoxious Stand-Up Law, and it demanded that other restrictive measures should be annulled. So bitter was the Federal antagonism in the Council that during all the spring session of 1817, the Tolerationists loudly complained that every reform measure proposed in the House was lost in the Federal Senate.
In short, while the Presbyterians in London were in the flush of their first success against the Sectaries and the Tolerationists, in walked Oliver Cromwell. Events had been qualifying Cromwell more and more for the task. His Independency, or let us call it Tolerationism, had been long known.
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