dryish morsels from Bucer, duly labelled and introduced; but they make it clear that Bucer's notion of marriage was substantially the same as Milton's.

As respects Milton himself, the portion of his new Tract which is of greatest interest is the prefixed Address to the Parliament. It is noteworthy that, whereas the Second Edition of his original Divorce treatise is dedicated to "the Parliament of England with the Assembly," the new tract is dedicated to the Parliament only. The Address makes the reason of this plain. It is here, in fact, that we first hear from Milton himself of the obloquy to which his Divorce Doctrine had subjected him. It had begun, he now tells us (and we have already used the information), almost immediately after the publication of the first, and anonymous, edition of his original treatise-his style then betraying him to be the author, and some of the clergy opening loud cry against him in consequence. This had induced him to bring out the second edition, not anonymous, but openly acknowledged. Though aware of the declared hostility among the clergy, he had not then deemed it proper to descant on that subject, but had, in courtesy, dedicated the Second Edition to the Assembly in conjunction with the Parliament. Even then he had no doubt from which of the two bodies he would receive the fairer treatment. "I was confident," he says in his present address of the Bucer tract to the Parliament, "if anything 'generous, anything noble and above the multitude, were yet "left in the spirit of England, it could be nowhere sooner "found, and nowhere sooner understood, than in that House "of Justice and true Liberty where ye sit in Council." Here the Assembly is ignored, and the insinuation is that, though he had included them in the dedication, it was rather by way of form than in real trust. This had been in Feb. 1643-4, and now, in July 1644, he knew his position so precisely that there was no need for farther reticence. He had not been disappointed in the Parliament. He had had hope in them; "nor doth the event hitherto, for some reasons which I shall "not here deliver, fail me of what I conceived so highly." The words I have put in italics can bear no other construction

than that Milton had reason to know, from private assurances, which he regarded as confidential, that some leading men in Parliament thought him perfectly entitled to broach his doctrine, and would take care that he should not be troubled for it. He was not uninformed either, he adds, that "divers learned and judicious men," both in and out of Parliament, had “testified their daily approbation" of his treatise. With the Assembly, however, he knew it to be all over. Though from them above all, by reason of "their profession and supposed knowledge," his treatise had deserved a fair hearing, all that he had received was to be "esteemed the deviser of a new and pernicious paradox." He does not, indeed, name the Assembly while intimating this, but only refers to the clergy generally and dispersedly. That he had the Assembly distinctly in view, however, appears not only from the tenor of the whole, but also from a passage in the Postscript, where he hints that such action was at work against him that he might be stopped any day by the official censorship and prevented from printing. If, therefore, this new tract should be permitted to appear, only to the Parliament would he dedicate it. But, while dedicated to the Parliament, it was intended for the Assembly. It was a challenge to them. The Reverend gentlemen had refused to consider the Doctrine. of Divorce when propounded by their contemporary, a private layman and reasoner. They had thought it worthy only of denunciation as an impious paradox, destructive of morality and social order. What would they now say to the same Doctrine exhibited to them, chapter and verse, as the doctrine of one of the great European Reformers and Divines, whose name was often in their mouths, though they knew so little about him?

While the Address to Parliament thus makes clear Milton's consciousness that the Assembly were watching him and might at any time denounce him, there is yet another curious strain in it, interesting as an illustration of the writer's character. Milton was evidently divided between delight in having found Bucer his predecessor in the doctrine and a proud feeling of his own self-earned property in the

same.

Not even to Bucer would he yield the palm of this discovery; nay, generally, he did not care though it should be known that, while he reverenced Bucer and such men of the past, he did not think that God's power to create and endow exceptional human spirits had so exhausted itself in that time and that group of men but that work higher than aught of mere discipleship to any of them might be reserved for himself. Here Milton is in one of his constitutional moods; and it is interesting to observe with what constancy to it he treats the small fact of a discovered coincidence in opinion between himself and Bucer. The following passage will suffice in this respect, and also as a specimen of the whole tract:

"I may justly gratulate mine own mind with due acknowledgment of assistance from above, which led me, not as a learner, but as a collateral teacher, to a sympathy of judgment with no less a man than Martin Bucer. And he, if our things here below arrive him where he is, does not repent him to see that point of knowledge which he first, and with an unchecked freedom, preached to those more knowing times of England, now found so necessary, though what he admonished were lost out of our memory, yet that God doth now again create the same doctrine in another unwritten table [the tabula rasa of Milton's mind], and raises it up immediately out of his pure oracle to the convincement of a perverse age, eager in the reformation of names and ceremonies, but in realities as traditional and as ignorant as their forefathers. I would ask now the foremost of my profound accusers whether they dare affirm that to be licentious, new and dangerous, which Martin Bucer so often and so urgently avouched to be most lawful, most necessary, and most Christian, without the least blemish to his good name among all the worthy men of that age and since who testify so highly of him. If they dare, they must then set up an arrogance of their own against all those churches and saints who honoured him without this exception. If they dare not, how can they now make that licentious doctrine in another which was never blamed or confuted in Bucer or in Fagius? The truth is, there will be due to them, for this their unadvised rashness, the best donative that can be given them-I mean a round reproof [a hint to Parliament about the Assembly?]; now that, where they thought to be most magisterial, they have displayed their own want both of read

ing and of judgment: first, to be so unacquainted in the writings of Bucer, which are so obvious and so useful in their own faculty; next, to be so caught in a prejudicating weakness as to condemn that for lewd which, whether they knew or not, these elect servants of Christ commended for lawful, and for new that which was taught by these, almost the first and greatest authors of Reformation, who were never taxed for so teaching, and dedicated without scruple to a royal pair of the first Reforming kings in Christendom [Edward VI., for whom Bucer's De Regno Christi was written, and Christian III. of Denmark, to whom it was dedicated when published at Basle in 1557], and confessed in the public Confession of a most orthodoxal Church and State in Germany [the church and community of Strasburg, in whose Confession, according to Milton, Bucer's Divorce Doctrine had been adopted]. This is also another fault which I must tell them-that they have stood now almost this whole year clamouring afar off, while the Book [Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce] hath been twice printed, twice bought up, and never once vouchsafed a friendly conference with the author, who would be glad and thankful to be shown an error, either by private dispute or public answer, and could retract as well as wise men before him: might also be worth the gaining, as one who heretofore hath done good service to the Church, by their own confession. . . . However, if we know at all when to ascribe the occurrences of this life to the work of a special Providence, as nothing is more usual in the talk of good men, what can be more like to a special providence of God than in the first Reformation of England that this question of Divorce, as a main thing to be restored to just freedom, was written, and seriously commended to Edward the Sixth, by a man called from another country to be an instructor of our nation, and now, in this present renewing of the Church and Commonwealth, which we pray may be more lasting, that same question should be again treated and presented to this Parliament by one enabled to use" the same reasons without the least sight or knowledge of what was done before. It were no trespass, Lords and Commons, though something of less note were attributed to the ordering of a Heavenly Power. This question, therefore, of such prime concernment to Christian and Civil welfare, in such an extraordinary manner not recovered, but plainly twice-born to these latter ages, as from a divine hand, I tender to your acceptance and most considerate thoughts."

MR. HERBERT PALMER'S ATTACK ON MILTON FROM THE PULPIT.

Whether up to this time (July 1644) there had been any open mention of Milton and his Doctrine in the Westminster Assembly, anything more than muttered thunder among the Divines in their private colloquies, can be but guessed. It is quite possible that he was publicly named, and not by mere implication, among the Sects and Sectaries generally. There may even be record of the fact somewhere, though I have found none in Lightfoot's Notes of the Assembly, nor in Gillespie's, nor in Baillie's Letters. But the peal was coming, and this daring challenge to the Assembly in his Bucer tract may have helped to provoke it.

When the tract was published, the Assembly was about to break up for that fortnight's vacation (July 23-Aug. 7) which we have represented as so important a notch in its proceedings. Or, indeed, the Assembly may have been in its vacation when the tract appeared; for, though registered at the Stationers' Hall July 15, it may not have been in circulation till a week later. At all events, when the Assembly met again, and when, as we have seen, it fell, as if by concert, on the subject of the multiplication of the Sectaries and their insolences, then Milton was among the first attacked. He was one of a batch of eleven persons, including also Roger Williams, John Goodwin, Clement Wrighter, and some Anabaptists and Antinomians, whom the Assembly denounced to Parliament as prime offenders. This fact, already noticed in its place in our general history, has now again to be presented more in detail.

The first publicly to blow the trumpet against Milton, the reader already knows, was Mr. Herbert Palmer. He did so in his Sermon before the two Houses of Parliament in St. Margaret's, Westminster, on the Extraordinary Day of Humiliation, Tuesday, Aug. 13, six days after the Assembly had

1 See antè, pp. 160-166.