A sketch of the struggle for religious liberty during the course of the last four hundred years will be attempted in this paper. Attention will first be focussed on the theories and factors affecting persecution and tolerance on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. Then the administrative aspects of the subject will be considered alike from the broader standpoint of the structure of the church and of the state and from the more specific angle of the handling of dissent by political authority. Finally brief consideration will be devoted to residual and perennial problems of constraint and freedom.

Humanists and reformers in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation were concerned for the revival of antiquity both classical and Biblical. Some stressed one and some the other and some like Erasmus were interested in both. Because of the close relation of the two fields, we have brought together into one chapter two essays dealing first with the classical and then with the Biblical scholarship of our period.

In 1652 John Milton reminded Cromwell that the chief end for which the Civil War had been fought—to gain religious liberty—had not yet been attained:

New foes arise,

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.

Help us to save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw.

Yet, despite the fervor of Milton's plea, it was plain to the clear-sighted Englishman in the early 1650's that by far the greater threat to religion was the lack of order and government in the church. Thus, when Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653 no problem seemed graver than that of restoring order in the church. He must furthermore do this in such a way as to keep the support of all the sects. The ship of state must be carefully steered between the Scylla of intolerance and the Charybdis of ecclesiastical disorder.

John Hales's life during the Marian Exile throws much light on the development of that Puritan group which came back to England in 1558 and helped to found the Elizabethan church in the chaos left from the Roman Catholic reaction of Queen Mary. While Bishop Ponet and John Knox were formulating the political credo of the later Puritan party, Hales was working out his “congregational experiment” in the field of practical politics at Frankfort.