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talents and my industry to this one important object. I accordingly wrote two books to a friend, concerning the reformation of the Church of England."

That the prosecution of this purpose was distasteful to him, and only undertaken under an imperious sense of duty, we learn from his own acknowledgment; for he laments that he was forced "to interrupt the pursuit of his hopes, and to leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark on a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." And, again: "For surely to every good and peaceable man, it must, in nature, needs be a hateful thing to be the displeaser and molester of thousands; much better would it like him, doubtless, to be the messenger of gladness and contentment, which is his chief intended business to all mankind, but that they resist and oppose their own true happiness. But when God commands to take the trumpet, and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say, or what he shall conceal. If he shall think to be silent, as Jeremiah did, because of the reproach and the derision he met with daily, ‘and all his familiar friends watched for his halting,' to be revenged on him for speaking the truth, he would be forced to confess as he confessed: His word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones: I was weary with forbearing, and could not stay.' Lastly, I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself-led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand."*

*

In describing the train of reasoning pursued in the two books "Of Reformation in England, and the Causes that

*

The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy.' Prose Works, vol. ii. pp. 474, 477.

hitherto have hindered it," I shall adopt, with but little alteration, the brief but complete analysis of Toland. In the first, he points out what were, during and subsequent to the reign of Henry VIII., the real impediments to a perfect reformation in this kingdom. These he reduces under two principal heads-the retention of popish ceremonies, and the confiding to diocesan bishops illegitimate powers from which the people were excluded. "Our ceremonies," he says, “are senseless in themselves, and serve for nothing but either to facilitate our return to popery, or to hide the defects of better knowledge, or to set off the pomp of prelacy." With regard to the bishops, he affirms that, “at the beginning, though they had removed the pope, they hugged the popedom, and shared the authority among themselves.” That, in King Edward VI.'s time, "they were, with their prostitute gravities, the common stoles to countenance every politic fetch that was then on foot. If a toleration for mass was to be begged of the king for his sister Mary, lest Charles V. should be angry, who but the grave prelates, Cranmer and Ridley, should be sent to extort it from the young king? But out of the mouth of that godly and royal child, Christ himself returned such an awful repulse to these halting and time-serving prelates, that, after much bold importunity, they went their way, not without shame and tears. When the Lord Sudley, Admiral of England, was wrongfully to lose his life, no man could be found fitter than Latimer to divulge, in his sermon, the forged accusations laid to his charge, to defame him with the people. Cranmer, one of the king's executors, and the other bishops did, to gratify the ambition of a traitor, consent to exclude from the succession, not only Mary the papist, but also Elizabeth the protestant, though before declared by themselves the lawful issue of their late master." In Queen Elizabeth's reign, he imputes the obstruction of a further reformation still to the bishops; and then proceeds to prove, from antiquity, that all ecclesiastical elections belonged to

the people; but that if those ages had favoured episcopacy, we should not be much concerned, since the best times were extensively infected with error, the best men of those times foully tainted, and the best writings of those men dangerously adulterated. These propositions he labours to prove at large, and thus concludes: “But I trust they for whom God hath reserved the honour of reforming this church, will easily perceive their adversary's drift in thus calling for antiquity. They fear the plain field of the Scriptures; the chase is too hot; they seek the dark, the bushy, the tangled forest; they would imbosk; they feel themselves struck in the transparent streams of Divine truth; they would plunge and tumble, and think to lie hid in the foul weeds and muddy waters where no plummet can reach the bottom. But let them beat themselves like whales, and spend their oil till they be dragged ashore: though wherefore should ministers give them so much line for shifts and delays? Wherefore should they not urge only the Gospel, and hold it ever in their faces, like a mirror of diamond, till it dazzle and pierce their misty eyeballs,-maintaining the honour of its absolute sufficiency and supremacy inviolable ?"

In the second book, he continues his discourses of prelatical episcopacy, and displays the political aspect of the system, which he shows to be always opposed to liberty. He deduces its history from its remotest origin, and proves that, "in England particularly, it is so far from being, as commonly alleged, the only form of church discipline agreeable to monarchy, that the mortallest diseases and convulsions of the government did ever proceed from the craft of the prelates, or were occasioned by their pride."

Having thus indicated the general scope of this treatise, I shall endeavour to bring the reader better acquainted with it, by selecting a few passages which best convey an impression of Milton's controversial powers and style, which most clearly develop his ecclesiastical principles, and which are best calculated to attach to the prose writings of Milton a

greater amount of attention than they have ever as yet received.

He naturally commences with the first grand defection from the simplicity of the Christian religion—the papal apostacy; and after lamenting its fraud of" deceivable traditions, its beggary of old cast rudiments, and its sensual idolatry," he adds, "Attributing purity or impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the spirit to the outward and customary eye-service of the body, as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual; they began to draw down all the Divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea, the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form, urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold, and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe, or the flamen's vestry: then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul, by this means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downward: and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken, and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod on in the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity."

From these general considerations, Milton descends to the two great particulars and the erroneous views which have most distracted the church ever since his day, viz., the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the relation which its pretended priesthood sustains towards them. This point he dismisses with brevity, but in terms pregnant

"Then was

with instruction to the present generation. baptism changed into a kind of exorcism, and water, sanctified by Christ's institute, thought little enough to wash off the original spot, without the scratch or cross impression of a priest's forefinger: and that feast of free grace and adoption to which Christ invited his disciples to sit as brethren, and co-heirs of the happy covenant, which at that table was to be sealed to them, even that feast of love and heavenlyadmitted fellowship, the seal of filial grace, became the subject of horror, and glouting adoration, pageanted about like a dreadful idol; which sometimes deceives well-meaning men, and beguiles them of their reward, by their voluntary humility: which, indeed, is fleshly pride, preferring a foolish sacrifice, and the rudiments of the world, as St. Paul to the Colossians explaineth, before a savoury obedience to Christ's example."

From the shadow of these mournful considerations Milton emerges with an evident sense of elation and relief to celebrate the glorious, though partial, revival of religious truth which had been witnessed by the age immediately preceding his own. "But to dwell no longer in characterizing the depravities of the church, and how they sprung and how they took increase; when I recall to mind at last, after so many dark ages, wherein the huge overshadowing train of error had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of the church; how the bright and blissful Reformation (by divine power) struck through the black and settled night of ignorance and anti-christian tyranny, methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears; and the sweet odour of the returning gospel imbathe his soul with the fragrancy of heaven. Then was the sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it, the schools opened, divine and human learning raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues, the princes and cities trooping apace to the new-erected banner of salvation; the martyrs, with

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