a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot, and downtrodden vassals of perdition.17

Here is no longer the cold and artistic man of letters, the author of Comus; there is passion here; Milton has thrown himself wholly into the struggle, with his whole pride and power of hatred and vision, in the service of a great ideal. He is certain of victory: victory on Earth first, and soon after, the eternal reign of Christ, "shortly expected."

In that day of triumph, Milton expected to reassume his natural rôle and become again a poet. And he did again become a poet, but it was in the failure and ruin of all his ambitions, and not as he had dreamt. But the generous dream reveals the unity of his soul and life, the inevitable relationship between his political career and his literary aims, the part he wished to play when entering the struggle. We see here also the deeper source of his epic poetry: it was to be the song of triumph. In defeat, the source of inspiration will be the same: Paradise Lost will be the song of hope and comfort to the vanquished. From 1641, Milton understood whence his poem was to come to him- from the very struggle for which he seemed to be giving it up.

Milton's second pamphlet, published in July, 1641, was an answer to a pamphlet by Archbishop Usher, and has but little interest. It is short, and the full title is sufficient to give an idea of its subject-matter, the form calling for no remarks: Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and whether it may be deduced from the apostolical times, by virtue of

17 Ibid., II, 417-19.

those testimonies which are alleged to that purpose in some late Treatises, one whereof goes under the name of James, Archbishop of Armagh. Milton naturally comes to the conclusion that it may not, and shows a fine contempt for the Fathers of the Church and any authorities generally that may seem to be against him.

Meanwhile, Bishop Hall had replied to "Smectymnuus" in a defence of his Humble Remonstrance. Thereupon Milton retorted in July, 1641, with his Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus. In his preface, Milton apologizes for the violence of his language; that is, however, the only interest we can discover in the pamphlet, which takes up the Bishop's arguments one by one, in this form:

Remonst. It is God that makes the bishop, the king that gives the bishopric: what can you say to this?

Answ. What you shall not long stay for: we say it is God that makes a bishop, and the devil that makes him take a prelatical bishopric; as for the king's gift, regal bounty may be excusable in giving, where the bishop's covetousness is damnable in taking.

Remonst. Many eminent divines of the churches abroad have earnestly wished themselves in our condition.

Answ. I cannot blame them, they were not only eminent but supereminent divines, and for stomach much like to Pompey the Great, that could endure no equal. . . .

Remonst. No one clergy in the whole Christian world yields so many eminent scholars, learned preachers, grave, holy, and accomplished divines, as this church of England doth at this day. Answ. Ha, ha, ha! 18

A passage in section V shows that Milton felt no more respect for modern than for ancient authorities. "You think," he says, " you are fairly quit of this proof, because Calvin interprets it for you, as if we could be put off with

18 Ibid., III, 85, 87.

19

Calvin's name, unless we be convinced with Calvin's reason! But Spenser is quoted at length and considered as of much weight.20

In the beginning of 1642, Milton published a fourth pamphlet in which he explains more methodically and more soberly than in the previous ones his arguments against the Bishops: The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty. This short treatise and the following Apology for Smectymnuus are among the most interesting prose works of Milton, not through their main subject-matter, which is the usual polemic stuff, but through the wealth of information they contain on their author.

Milton is at this time a whole-hearted Presbyterian. In the preface to the Reason of Church Government, he gives us warning thus:

I shall . . . hope through the mercy and grace of Christ, the head and husband of his church, that England shortly is to belong, neither to see patriarchal nor see prelatical, but to the faithful feeding and disciplining of that ministerial order, which the blessed apostles constituted throughout the churches; and this, I shall essay to prove, can be no other than that of presbyters and deacons.21

Milton again brings forward an idea he has already harped upon, and uses one of his favorite methods of attack. What he combats, he says, has been established by the devil; later on, as we shall see, the devil will be the first king; here he appears as the first bishop. Some prelate having said that Adam was the first prelate, Milton muses thus:

To which assertion, had I heard it, because I see they are so insatiable of antiquity, I should have gladly assented, and confessed 19 Ibid., III, 73. 21 Ibid., II, 440-41.

20 Ibid., III, 84-85.

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

24

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.

23 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.26

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.