ABSTRACT
John Milton argues for the liberty of the press, William Walwyn took up the cause of the despised and persecuted sects, Henry Robinson's presented the economic case for toleration, and Williams called for the toleration of heretics, blasphemers, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and pagans. This chapter suggests historians have often elided civil tolerance with other forms of tolerance, particularly ecclesiastical. It argues that there was not an absolute gulf fixed between persecution and toleration. The call for toleration came from two distinct groups, who together formed a kind of pincer movement against the theory of persecution. Although the tolerationists of the 1640's assembled their doctrine using various elements of traditional Christian theology and biblical hermeneutics, the doctrine itself struck contemporaries as dangerously innovative. A policy of religious toleration was also advocated by politiques in both Protestant and Catholic countries, who saw it as the only way to avoid civil war when a nation was divided along confessional lines.
