pretence, but
particular Freedom to thyself was thy intent.  Amend, or else thou
wilt be shamed, when Knowledge doth spread to cover the Earth, even
as the waters cover the Seas.  And so Farewell. 

          
                                                                                                  J. W.”

To-day knowledge is commencing “to spread to cover the Earth even as the waters cover the Seas”; and the thinkers of our times are rapidly coming to realise, to use Shelley’s words, that—­“The most fatal error that ever happened in the world was the separation of political and ethical science”:  a separation against which, as we have seen, Winstanley in his time protested so vigorously.  Hence it is, probably, that the teachings of our modern seers and prophets, of the leaders and inspirers of the advanced thought of to-day, of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and even of Henry George, almost seem to us but as the echoes of those of their great forerunner in the stirring days of the Commonwealth.

FOOTNOTES: 

[163:1] History of the Commonwealth, vol. i. p. 446.

[163:2] Ibid. p. 471.

[164:1] King’s Pamphlets.  British Museum, Press Mark, E. 655.  Also at the Guildhall Library and the Bodleian.

[164:2] At the very time this book was being written, some of the new settlements in America were making Church Fellowship a necessary condition of civil rights.

[165:1] See Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches, Speech II., Sept. 4th, 1654, part viii. p. 20.

[166:1] This argument would have appealed strongly to Cromwell, who, in one of his Speeches to his First Parliament, said:  “If I had not a hope fixed in me that this cause and this business was of God, I would many years ago have run from it.  If it be of God, He will bear it up.  If it be of man, it will tumble; as everything that hath been of man since the world began hath done.  And what are all our Histories and other Traditions of Actions in former times but God manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken and tumbled down, and trampled upon everything that He had not planted.”—­Carlyle, Letters and Speeches, part viii. p. 89.

[168:1] With this contention, too, Cromwell would have found himself in complete sympathy.  For “the truth of it is, There are wicked and abominable laws which will be in your power to alter,” he said to one of his Parliaments on Sept. 17th, 1656.  “To hang a man for Six-and-eight-pence, and I know not what; to hang for a trifle and acquit murder,—­is in the ministration of the Law, through the ill framing of it.  I have known in my experience abominable murders acquitted.  And to see men lose their lives for petty matters:  this is a thing God will reckon for.  And I wish it may not lie upon this Nation a day longer than you have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it.  This hath been a great grief to many honest hearts and conscientious people; and I hope it is in all your hearts to rectify it.”