The
Catholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time as
numerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists. The army, the navy, and nine
tenths of the people of England were Protestants. Real danger,
therefore, from a simple act of justice towards their Catholic fellow-
citizens, the people of England had no ground for apprehending. But the
great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout
Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and
not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is
sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the
seventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the
Catholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudices
of the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarian
ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian
charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of
its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal
toleration.
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