“Everyone is ready to say, They fight for their Country, and what they do, they do it is for the good of their Country. Well, let it appear now that thou hast fought and acted for thy Country’s Freedom. But if when thou hast power to settle Freedom in thy Country, thou takest the possession of the Earth into thy own particular hands, and makest thy Brother work for thee, as the Kings did, thou hast fought and acted for thyself, not for thy Country, and here thy inside hypocrisy is discovered.
“But here take notice, That Common Freedom, which is the Rule I would have practiced and not talked on, was thy 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.
[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.