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. 31 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

"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:

32 Ibid., III, 117-22.

Which of these three will the confuter affirm to exceed the capacity of a plain artisan? And what reason then is there left, wherefore he should be denied his voice in the election of his minister, as not thought a competent discerner?

It is but arrogance therefore, and the pride of a metaphysical fume, to think that "the mutinous rabble" (for so he calls the Christian congregation) "would be so mistaken in a clerk of the university," that were to be their minister. I doubt me those clerks, that think so, are more mistaken in themselves; and what with truanting and debauchery, what with false grounds and the weakness of natural faculties in many of them, (it being a maxim in some men to send the simplest of their sons thither,) perhaps there would be found among them as many unsolid and corrupted judgments, both in doctrine and life, as in any other two corporations of like bigness. This is undoubted, that if any carpenter, smith, or weaver were such a bungler in his trade, as the greater number of them are in their profession, he would starve for any custom.33

The pamphlets against the Bishops show us Milton at the starting-point of his thinking: he is still the orthodox believer who prays to the Trinity; he is still a Presbyterian and a royalist.

One passion is dominant in him, the passion for liberty, and at bottom that is only the pride of his individual development. But this passion, expressed here by the violence of his polemics, will draw him out of all bondsout of dogmatic orthodoxy, which will be in contradiction with his high idea of himself and of human nature; out of Presbyterianism, too narrow for him, as it holds its adherents to a creed and a discipline; out of royalism also, since in the next few years this will prove incompatible with the spirit of liberty.

We must note also that Milton, in his first pamphlets, has no doctrine to defend. He is incessantly attacking. It is only through chance allusions that we discover what

33 Ibid., III, 154-55.

he believes, or what he thinks he believes. For, in truth, he has not, as yet, examined his beliefs. He has identified himself with a cause without looking into it very closely. What he is really fighting for is not Presbyterianism, which he is going to abandon, but his own personality, his right to think as he likes.

The personal character of these polemics of Milton is not therefore only a matter of form; it is in the substance of his work. It is Milton's egotism which happens to be, for the time, the champion of the Presbyterians. But a crisis is coming which will show him that the Presbyterians also do not acknowledge his right to think and live as he likes. Then he will forsake the party, unhesitatingly, without even meaning to, or doing it intentionally. He will think at first of converting the party to his views. But he will soon have to give that up. His pamphlets in favor of divorce will be personal in substance, even more than his pamphlets in favor of the Presbyterians. Indeed, it was by a mere coincidence that in these he found himself at one with a party; and the illusion was short-lived.

But Milton's egotism will not remain limited to itself. Because of his peculiar pride, his egotism will always need to be identified with something great. We have just seen. him identifying himself with a cause, and nobly vindicating his character so that the cause may not be spotted. But once that cause is given up as, after all, narrow and mediocre, Milton will not consent to be only Milton. He will put himself into the service of the Republic, and, last of all and most of all, into the service of God. And Milton will end by identifying himself with God, being the spokesman and indeed a very part of the Divinity.

But he will then confer the same privilege on all men