Winstanley's writings met with the fate that awaits all thought much in
advance of the times in which it is given to the world. They have been
ignored and forgotten; and till very recently even his memory had
vanished from the minds of his fellow-countrymen, to whose emancipation
he unstintedly devoted his life. Nor can we be surprised at this, when
we consider the circumstances. There can be little doubt but that his
earlier writings were the quiver whence the early Quakers derived many
of their arrows, their most pointed and consequently by their opponents
most hated doctrines. And yet the highly philosophic and rational
attitude toward cosmological and theological speculations Winstanley
attained to in his last pamphlet, placed before our readers in Chapter
XVI., seems to us sufficiently to account for his having been ignored
even by those who may have availed themselves of his earlier works, and
hence that these, too, should have been gradually forgotten.
That the same fate should have befallen his political writings, his
noble and yet simple and practical political ideals and aspirations, is
also not surprising. After the Restoration, when, as we have already
shown, Winstanley's bitter opponents, the old and new landholders, were
in the saddle, and made unsparing, we had almost written unscrupulous,
use of their opportunities, such doctrines as his were little likely to
commend themselves to the privileged, cultured and educated classes.
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