While I deplored and denounced the incivilities of Quakerism in my day (such as the going naked in public by some at sundry times), my position regarding their religious views was, "They will answer to God, at their own peril, in the great day approaching [that is, the day of divine judgment]."

God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state.

My aim is to lay bare and proclaim the crying and horrible guilt of the bloody doctrine of persecution as one of the most seditious, destructive, blasphemous, and bloodiest in any or all the nations of the world, notwithstanding the many fine veils, pretenses, and colors of not persecuting Christ Jesus, but heretics; not God's truth or servants, but blasphemers and seducers; not persecuting men for their conscience, but for sinning against their conscience; and like specious reasonings to justify the cruelty of intolerance.

Some eminent witnesses of God's truth believe that before the downfall of Antichrist [which virtually all Reformers construed to be Romanism], England must once again bow down her fair neck to his proud usurping yoke and foot.

This scripture [Romans 13:1-6] is wrested from the scope of God's Spirit, and the nature of the place, and cannot truly be interpreted to mean that the power of the civil magistrate may be exercised in spiritual or soul matters.

'Tis but worldly policy and compliance with men and times (God's mercy overruling) that holds your hands from the murdering of thousands and ten thousands, were your power and command as great as the bloody Roman emperors' formerly was.

Even if the civil magistrate is so gifted as to prophesy in the church, yet in the sphere of his civil duties he is forbidden to call down fire from heaven, that is, to procure or inflict any corporal punishment upon offenders in religious doctrine or practice, remembering Christ's admonition that He came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them.