them yet more ancient: for Lucifer, before Adam, was the first prelate angel..

22

Although a Presbyterian, Milton is already an apostle of toleration; his heart leans towards "sects and schisms," and he finds in their favor an ingenious and artistic argument:

it best beseems our Christian courage to think they are but as the throes and pangs that go before the birth of reformation, and that the work itself is now in doing. For if we look but on the nature of elemental and mixed things, we know they cannot suffer any change of one kind or quality into another, without the struggle of contrarieties. And in things artificial, seldom any elegance is wrought without a superfluous waste and refuse in the transaction. No marble statue can be politely carved, no fair edifice built, without almost as much rubbish and sweeping.23

However, in 1642, Milton still admits of excommunication, although he insists on the necessity of the greatest precautions before coming to it." In conclusion, he declares that the prelates are the best instruments of tyranny. The Anglican Church has used the Gospel as a weapon against liberty, and as a means to satiate avarice and ignoble ambition:

But when they have glutted their ungrateful bodies, at least, if it be possible that those open sepulchres should ever be glutted, and when they have stuffed their idolish temples with the wasteful pillage of your estates, will they yet have any compassion upon you, and that poor pittance which they have left you; will they be but so good to you as that ravisher was to his sister, when he had used her at his pleasure; will they but only hate ye, and so turn ye loose. No, they will not, lords and commons, they will not favour ye so much. . . .25 That if it should happen that a tyrant (God turn such a scourge from us to our enemies) should come to grasp the sceptre, here were his spearmen and his lances, here were his

22 Ibid., II, 450.

28 Ibid., II, 469.

24 Ibid., II, 497-98.

25 The allusion is to II Samuel 13:18.

firelocks ready, he should need no other pretorian band nor pensionary than these, if they could once with their perfidious preachments awe the people.20

And again:

prelaty, whom the tyrant custom begot, a natural tyrant in religion, and in state the agent and minister of tyranny, seems to have had this fatal gift in her nativity, like another Midas, that whatsoever she should touch or come near either in ecclesial or political government, it should turn, not to gold, though she for her part could wish it, but to the dross and scum of slavery, breeding and settling both in the bodies and the souls. ...

27

Here is Milton's opinion of the Universities, ten years after he had left Cambridge:

Which makes me wonder much that many of the gentry, studious men as I hear, should engage themselves to write and speak publicly in her defence; but that I believe their honest and ingenuous natures coming to the universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry, were sent home again with such a scholastic bur in their throats, as hath stopped and hindered all true and generous philosophy from entering, cracked their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms. . .

28

And here is a sample of Milton's forcible rhetoric:

outrageous desire of filthy lucre. Which the prelates make so little conscience of, that they are ready to fight, and if it lay in their power, to massacre all good Christians under the names of horrible schismatics, for only finding fault with their temporal dignities, their unconscionable wealth and revenues, their cruel authority over their brethren, that labour in the word, while they snore in their luxurious excess. . . . More like that huge dragon of Egypt, breathing out waste and desolation to the land, unless he were daily fattened with a virgin's blood . . . this mighty sail-winged monster, that menaces to swallow up the land unless her bottomless gorge may be satisfied with the blood of the king's daughter, the 26 Prose Works, II, 501-02. 27 Ibid., II, 503. 28 Ibid., II, 504.

..

church; and may, as she was wont, fill her dark and infamous den with the bones of the saints.29

But Milton is still loyal to the King, as were most Englishmen at the time. The King, as well as England, is to be liberated from the prelates' yoke. Let us notice by the way that the subject of Samson has already caught Milton's attention:

I cannot better liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his godlike shoulders. And while he keeps them about him undiminished and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is, with the word of his meanest officer,30 suppress and put to confusion thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and thinks no harm, they wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty tresses of his law, and just prerogatives, which were his ornament and strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which, as those Philistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his natural discerning, and make him grind in the prisonhouse of their sinister ends and practices upon him: till he, knowing this prelatical rasor to have bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the golden beams of law and right; and they sternly shook, thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great affliction to himself.31

Early in 1642, Bishop Hall and his son attacked Milton (on the occasion of his Animadversions) in a most scurrilous and violent pamphlet. Milton answered in April with his Apology for Smectymnuus, and thus we owe to the Halls some of the most beautiful pages of Milton's prose. These are so well known and so easily accessible unlike

29 Ibid., II, 505.

30 Milton's sense of humor seems somewhat in abeyance here, as often happens to him. 81 Prose Works, II, 506.

many others in the pamphlets-that I shall only reproduce here a few passages which will be useful to us as landmarks in the evolution of Milton's ideas.

First let us hear him on love and chastity:

... and above them all, [I] preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts, without transgression.

Next, (for hear me out now, readers,) that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron. So that even these books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast observation of that virtue which abhors the society of bordelloes.

Thus, from the laureat fraternity of poets, riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading led me to the shady spaces of philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon: where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy; (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love's name, carries about;) and how the first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, producing those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtue. With such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listening, readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding; not in these noises, the adversary, as ye know, barking at the door, or searching for me at the bordelloes, where it may be he has lost himself and raps up without pity the sage and rheumatic old prelates, . . . to inquire for such a one.

... But having had the doctrine of holy scripture unfolding those chaste and high mysteries, with timeliest care infused, that

V

V

"the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body "; thus also
I argued to myself, that if unchastity in a woman, whom St.
Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and dishonour,
then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God,
it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouring
and dishonourable; in that he sins both against his own body, which
is the perfecter sex, and his own glory, which is in the woman; and,
that which is worst, against the image and glory of God, which is
in himself. Nor did I slumber over that place expressing such high
rewards of ever accompanying the Lamb, with those celestial songs
to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defiled
with women, which doubtless means fornication; for marriage must
not be called a defilement.3
32

"For marriage must not be called a defilement ": this is the corrective to Comus, to the hymn to total chastity; and also the distinction, inherited from the Elizabethans, which will play so great a part in Milton's life and thought, between love commanded and love forbidden, love and lust; and lust is counted already as the lowest degradation of men; it will later become the fall, essentially.

"The body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." Here are the first germs of the fundamental doctrine of Paradise Lost and of the Treatise of Christian Doctrine, that the body is not only from, but of the Lord: the body is a part of God, matter is a part of the Divinity. The passage shows us how Milton was driven to pantheism by his pride and chastity: his body was holy in his eyes; his body will be of the substance of God; matter will be of the substance of God.

Here is now Milton's good opinion of the lower classes, a good opinion that was destined not to survive the Restoration:

82 Ibid., III, 117-22.