Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some pleaded with new zeal for tolerance all round; arguing that certainty on articles of faith and points of religion was impossible--a doctrine promptly classed as a bad heresy. [352] The plea that toleration would mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort that the "sectaries" would themselves persecute if they could. [353] But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the new parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should leave religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even atheism; and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding on "universal reason" the right of all men to the soil. [354] In the strictly theological field the most striking innovation, apart from simple Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the existence of future torments--a position first taken up, as we have seen, either by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English heretics of the Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the time of Marlowe. [355] In this connection the learned booklet [356] entitled Of the Torments of Hell: the foundations and pillars thereof discover'd, search'd, shaken, and removed (1658) was rightly thought worth translating into French by d'Holbach over a century later. [357] It is an argument on scriptural lines, denying that the conception of a place of eternal torment is either scriptural or credible; and pointing out that many had explained it in a "spiritual" sense.
Humane feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment; but a contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards, who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set himself to catalogue the host of heresies that threatened to overwhelm the times, speaks of "monsters" unheard-of theretofore, "now common among us--as denying the Scriptures, pleading for a toleration of all religions and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and denying there is a God." [358] "A Toleration," he declares, "is the grand design of the Devil, his masterpiece and chief engine"; "every day now brings forth books for a Toleration." [359] Among the 180 sects named by him [360] there were "Libertines," "Antiscripturists," "Skeptics and Questionists," [361] who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of conscience; [362] as well as Socinians, Arians, and Anti-trinitarians; and he speaks of serious men who had not only abandoned their religious beliefs, but sought to persuade others to do the same. [363] Under the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he was of Christian sectarianism, and even of Unitarianism as represented by Biddle, the more advanced heresies would get small liberty; though that of Thomas Muggleton and John Reeve, which took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does not seem to have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that there was no devil or evil spirit, save in "man's spirit of unclean reason and cursed imagination"; [364] but it was only privately that such men as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could avow themselves to be of "the natural religion." The statement of Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that "many of the republicans began to profess deism," cannot be taken literally, though it is broadly intelligible that "almost all of them were for destroying all clergymen ... and for leaving religion free, as they called it, without either encouragement or restraint."