Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/123

 by examples drawn from the history of ancient Rome rather than from the passions of the Hebrew prophets, understood the limitations which must qualify religious maxims when applied to human affairs. But without the support of the army they were powerless, and the army, since the retirement of Fairfax and the death of Cromwell, had become the prey of enthusiasts, whose views on government, doubtless sincere, were as impossible as those which animated the fanatics of Jerusalem in the last days of the kingdom of Judah. Of the purely political ideas which had inspired the Republican party some took refuge in America, where in New England they found a soil ready to receive them, and likely to produce, as Dr. Petty with true political prescience foresaw, some great movement at a future time, which might astonish the world. Others lay hid in the ground waiting the seed time of a later age in England. Fear of the political and religious supremacy of Rome, which was the dominant public sentiment of the generation which had fought in the Civil War, and in which Cromwell had found the force which alone rendered the triumph of the Parliament over the King possible, had not indeed ceased to exist, and, as events were before long to prove, could again easily be worked into a fierce activity; but at least for the time it was no longer the mainspring of public action. Since the peace of Westphalia a truce was understood to exist, and with the recognition of the practical independence of Protestant Germany, religious freedom was felt to have been saved. France, for the time, had become a tolerant Power, though a change was near at hand. In England an everincreasing number of the new generation shared neither the prejudices of the Cavaliers nor the fanaticism of the Puritans. Above all they were weary of perpetual strife. They were statesmen, jurists, and philosophers, resembling the ' parti politique ' which in France had endeavoured at the close of the preceding century, though unsuccessfully, to build up the edifice of civil and political liberty against the encroachments of the Crown and the Papacy, and to prevent the country being rent asunder by theological animosities. To this order