had been the natural flux and reflux of ideas during the intervening
decade, the waning of some sects and singularities that had no deep
root, the interblending of others, and new bursts in the teeming
chaos. _Atheists_, Sceptics_, _Mortalists_ or _Materialists_,
_Anti-Scripturists_, _Anti-Trinitarians_ or _Socinians_, _Arians_,
_Anti-Sabbatarians_, _Seekers_, and _Divorcers_ or _Miltonists_: all
these terms were still in the vocabulary of the orthodox, describing
persons or bodies of persons of whose opinions the Civil Magistrate
was bound to take account. Sects, on the other hand, that had been on
the black list ten years ago had now been admitted to respectability.
_Baptists_ or _Anabaptists_, _Antinomians, _Brownists_, nay even
INDEPENDENTS generally, had been regarded in 1644 as dark and
dangerous schismatics; but now, save in the private colloquies or
controversial tracts of Presbyterians, no feeling of horror attached
to those names. INDEPENDENTS, indeed, were now the Lords of the
Commonwealth, and _Anabaptists_ and _Antinomians_ were in high
places, so that the most orthodox Presbyterians found themselves side
by side with them in private gatherings and committees. In the
Established Church of the Protectorate there was to be a
comprehension of Presbyterians, Independents, and such Baptists and
other really Evangelical Sectaries as might be willing; and,
accordingly, the question of mere Toleration outside the Established
Church no longer concerned the Evangelical sects lying immediately
beyond ordinary Independency. If, from objection to the principle of
an Establishment, they chose to remain outside, they would have
toleration there as a matter of course. To make up, however, for this
removal of so many of the old Sectaries from all practical interest
in the question on their own account, there were new religious
denominations of such strange ways and tendencies, such unknown
relations to anything hitherto recognised as Orthodoxy or as Heresy,