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Updated: June 25, 2025
He chose a subject which would enable him, at any rate, while attacking Luther, to represent his own personal convictions, and to reckon on the concurrence not only of Romish zealots but also of a number of his Humanist friends, and even many men of deeply moral and religious disposition.
They were called "Zealots," because they were so much filled with zeal about killing off the Romans. A few even carried daggers with them, and stuck the daggers into Romans whenever they got a chance. "The Romans will not be overthrown," they said, "just by preaching. You will have to get out and kill the Romans." John himself said that he was not the Messiah.
They hoped for a kingdom as tangible as the Zealots sought, yet they preferred to wait for the consolation of Israel. They believed that God was still in his heaven, that he was not disregardful of his people, and that in his own time he would raise up unto them their king.
"Our precise zealots in the Reformed religion, on the one side," wrote Barneveld, "and the Jesuits on the other, are vigorously kindling the fire of discord. Keep a good lookout for the countermine which is now working against the good advice of his Majesty for mutual toleration.
Joy had burst asunder the last ligaments, so fretted away in unrevealing sorrow. Afar, their sound borne into that room, the joy-bells were pealing triumph; mobs roaring out huzzas; the weak cry of John Avenel might be blent in those shouts, as the drunken zealots reeled by his cottage door, and startled the screaming ravens that wheeled round the hollow oak.
Pym and his colleagues saw that the disunion in their ranks sprang above all from the question of the Church. On the one side were the Presbyterian zealots who were clamouring for the abolition of Episcopacy. On the other were the conservative tempers who in the dread of such demands were beginning to see in the course of the Parliament a threat against the Church which they loved.
On the eve of failure, and with the certainty, in such a result, of being branded as rebels and zealots, whose rashness had drawn down ruin on themselves, their families, and their country, it required no common share of fortitude to bear up against the danger that threatened them.
It does not, by any means, follow, that all good men are free from error, nor that error is less error because good men hold it; but to make the error which is less certain, a reason for disputing the goodness which is more certain, is the spirit, not of God, nor of the Church of God, but of those false zealots who put an idol in God's place; of such as rejected Christ and murdered Stephen.
The fringe of the wood was defaced with the litter of picnickers, and smelt of lunch; the din of the agents for new-fangled reapers and ploughs, whose gaudy paint was doubly garish against the sober background, had routed the squirrels and birds; but the remoter paths held only silent lovers, and the camp-ground, where the Widow Weatherwax had mouthed and played the prophet, stripped of its tents, its zealots, its wavering torchlights, was full of wholesome sunlight and forest peace.
The memory of those bitter days, when what he recognized as the good work of the Long Parliament had been rudely marred by the subsequent excesses of the zealots, and when the constitution had been overturned by violence which posed as legislation, was too vividly impressed upon his mind to suffer him to rest until the prelates of the Church were placed on their former level with the temporal peers.
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