became a part of the cause of the new model army. The doctrinal policies of the protectorate were largely conservative. However, this Puritan train of thought could also point towards liberty of conscience. For Congregationalists, truth lay in the spirit rather than institutions. Like the Platonists, they searched for internal unity amidst external diversity. Further, Puritans valued conscience, which could be neither forced nor tested, over ritual and ceremony. So rather than toleration, the key debate among key figures in the Protectorate revolved around liberty of conscience. For Blair Worden, Cromwell’s religious policy was rooted in a search for union of believers, rather than toleration of differing beliefs, and religious persecution was the largest obstacle to this union. However, liberty of conscience extended only to "God’s peculiar" and not heretics (such as Quakers, Socinians, and Ranters). There was a great increase of religious freedom and the ecclesiastical diversity in Cromwellian England. This marked a revolutionary change and led to increasing toleration in the years after the interregnum ended. On the one hand, the loosely Calvinist Cromwell allowed the punishment of men such as the Unitarian John Biddle and the Quaker James Nayler, and accepted the restrictions on religious tolerance found in the Humble Petition and Advice of 1657. But on the other hand, his entourage included men who wanted more liberty of belief than he allowed. These non-sectarian ‘merciful men’ or politiques, who wanted to understand and tolerate beliefs different to their own, included Bulstrode Whitelocke, Matthew Hale, and Sir Charles Worsley. Millenarian 'admissionists' The toleration of Jews was largely borne by the hope of converting them to Christianity. Leonard Busher was one of the first to call for the readmission of the Jews to England and the toleration of their faith in 1616. Lawyer and MP, Henry Finch and the scholar Joseph Mede both wrote of the benefits of the conversion of the Jews in the 1620s. The Scottish minister John Wemyss advocated readmitting Jews to Christian lands with a view to converting them in the 1630s. So, by the 1640s, the imminent conversion of the Jews was a widespread belief among Puritans. Indeed during that decade the Christians who were most liberal towards Jews are also those who were most committed to their conversion. A number of these ‘admissionists’ were close to Cromwell, including John Sadler, John Dury, and Hugh Peter. Other notable readmissionists include exiled Royalist cleric