Owen on indulgence and tolerance

In a letter written to "a person of honour" in 1667, John Owen wrote as follows

... Do but open the prisons for the relief of those peaceable, honest, industrious, diligent men, who, some of them, have lain several years in durance, merely in the pursuit of excommunication, and there will be testimony enough given to this state of the controversy.
This being so, pray give me leave to present you with my hasty thoughts, both as to the reasonableness, conscience, and principles of pursuing that course of severity towards dissenters which I find so many concerned persons to plead for, and also of the way of their arguings and pleas.

... It seems, therefore, that we are some of the first who ever anywhere in the world, from the foundation of it, thought of ruining and destroying persons of THE SAME RELIGION with ourselves, merely upon the choice of some peculiar ways of worship in that religion; and it is but reasonable, as was observed, for men to look well to the grounds of what they do, when they act contrary to the principles of the law of nature, expressed in so many instances by the consent of mankind. And I fear all men do not aright consider what a secret influence into the enervating of political societies such intrenchments on the principles of natural light will assuredly have; for those things which spring up in the minds of men, without arguing or consideration from without, will insensibly prevail in them against all law and constitutions to the contrary. It is in vain to turn nature out of doors; it will return. ...
See the whole letter here.