Note 63 — Chapter VI · FERDINAND AND ISABELLA (continued 2)

Even Milton, in his essay on The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, the most splendid argument, perhaps, the world had then witnessed in behalf of intellectual liberty, would exclude popery from the benefits of toleration, as a religion which the public good required at all events to be extirpated. Such were the crude views of the rights of conscience entertained, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, by one of those gifted minds whose extraordinary elevation enabled it to catch and reflect back the coming light of knowledge, long before it had fallen on the rest of mankind.