Arguments for intolerance in a persecuting society

Restoration England was a persecuting society. It was the last period in English history when the ecclesiastical and civil powers endeavoured systematically to secure religious uniformity by coercive means. Those who set about this task were not silent about their reasons, and the intellectual defence of religious intolerance was no less vigorous than the practical. We should be in no doubt about how explicitly persecution was demanded. Scarcely a tremor of embarrassment disturbed the voices of divines who called for ‘a holy violence’ and ‘a vigorous and seasonable execution of penal laws’ against the ‘fanatic vermin’ whose conventicles troubled the land. Many an assize sermon became a fruitful occasion for rhetorically yoking priest and magistrate together in a godly cause, the sword of the latter animated by the spiritual admonition of the former. When heretics pervert the church's doctrine, when schismatics disrupt its order, when libertines scandalize its purity, then a bishop ‘must betake himself unto his rod and his keys’ and summon the magistrate to undertake ‘the pious use of the sword’.

Historians have often traced the growth of the idea of toleration – in this period dwelling on John Bunyan, John Locke, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, John Owen, and William Penn – and have frequently charted the gruesome realities, and limitations, of persecution, but they have rarely offered histories of the theory of intolerance. Perhaps this is because it is difficult for the modern liberal mind to grasp that intolerance was ever anything other than the product of unthinking bigotry. Doubtless it is true that many magistrates were more splenetic than reflective, and no doubt the bailiffs and informers who embezzled the goods they distrained from hapless Quakers gave little thought to theology. But if Bunyan's Mr Badman is an unprepossessing figure, behind him stood an impressively articulate regiment of clergymen, of the sort whom contemporaries honoured as ‘pious, sober, and rational divines’.

There may be said to be three strands in the Restoration case for intolerance, although this chapter is concerned only with the third and least recognized. They may be called the political, the ecclesiological, and the theological arguments. The first is familiar enough: the Dissenters must be crushed because they are vicious rebels who made war upon their king and plunged the nation into twenty years of blood and usurpation. Schismatic conventicles are seed-plots of sedition.