CER June 21. Proposed new govern. diverted from ecclesiastical purposes. At last, on June 21, the important point of the government to be substituted. for Episcopacy was reached. The younger Vane proment of the posed a clause providing that Commissioners should be appointed for the present in each diocese to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and that these Commissioners should be appointed in equal numbers from the laity and the clergy. Church. Here, then, was the Root-and-Branch scheme at last. It was referred to a sub-committee, to be put into shape. If the feeling against Episcopacy gathered strength from the growing distrust felt in the King, it did not originate there. Outside the House the Puritan spirit was mounting, and the Puritan spirit assailed not so much the episcopal constitution of the Church as the forms of worship which the bishops protected. At the end of March five English divines, joining their initials to form the uncouth name Smectymnuus, had issued a pamphlet in support of Presbyterianism in reply to Hall's 'Humble Remonstrance.' Sinectym nuus. 'Smectymnuus' was too professional to lift the controversy above the Calvinistic orthodoxy of the day. In the end of June (2) May, or the beginning of June, a new champion ap Milton's let. first pamph. peared on the scene. The singer of the Comus and the Lycidas felt that the time had now come when it behoved him to lay aside that task of high poesy for which he had been girding himself from his youth up, and to throw himself into the great controversy, on the issue of which, as he firmly believed, depended the future weal or woe of England. Much of the argument by which he supported Presbyterianism against Episcopacy is familiar to the student of the pamphlets and the speeches of that eventful year. But whilst 'D'Ewes's Diary, Harl. MSS. clxiii. fol. 337. 2 Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, William Spurstow. Professor Masson (Life of Milton, ii. 219) is mistaken in quoting Cleveland's poem as evidence of the immediate popularity of the book. Cleveland speaks of the co'lection of the poll-tax, and his poem must therefore have been written some weeks after the date of the appearance of Smectymnuus. " 1641 THE MILTONIC IDEAL. 391 others contented themselves with argument from Scripture or from Church history, or with the wearisome repetition of doctrines which appeared to them to contain the sum of all truth, Milton drove right into the very heart of the matter, and in that wonderful rhythmical prose on which the reader is upborne as on a strong and steady stream, strove to impress upon the world around the central doctrine of the Comus, that spiritual perfection is not to be reached through the operation of the bodily senses. "Sad it is," he wrote, "how that doctrine of the Gospel, planted by teachers divinely inspired, and by them winnowed and sifted from the chaff of overdated ceremonies, and refined to such a spiritual height and temper of purity and knowledge of the Creator, that the body, with all the circumstances of time and place, were purified by the affections of the regenerate soul, and nothing left impure but sin; faith needing not the weak and fallible office of the senses to be either the ushers or interpreters of heavenly mysteries, save where our Lord Himself in His sacraments ordained,--that such a doctrine should, through the grossness and blindness of her professors and the fraud of deceivable traditions, drag so downwards as to backslide one way into the Jewish beggary of old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the newly-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry, 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 over bodying 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." In these words lay the central fire which warmed the hearts of all the nobler assailants of episcopacy and the Prayer Book. Their thought might be overlaid by political considerations or social jealousies, but_at_the_bottom it was this that was meant by them all. To Laud's notion of a training of the spirit by the external habit they opposed the notion of the spirit loosing itself from bonds, contemptuously freeing itself from outward. ceremonies or disciplinary institutions, and content to direct its course for itself in accordance with the will of its heavenly guide. It needs not to be said how one-sided a view of human nature it was. Man cannot profitably shake himself thus loose from external helps. Laud's doctrine, too, had a truth of its own. Familiar institutions and habitual actions mould the life of a man far more than Milton would own. Milton's prose, like Milton's poetry, gave but the noblest expression to a onesided tendency of the human mind. He declaimed against institutions because their importance was altogether unintelligible to him. With the struggle for representative government he felt sympathy only so far as it appeared to him to subserve the development of a vigorous spiritual and intellectual life. That which had alarmed the Cheshire petitioners had no terrors Language of for him. "We cannot but express," they had said, the Cheshire in reply to the Presbyterians, "our just fears, that strance. their desire is to introduce an absolute innovation of Presbyterian government, whereby we, who are now governed by the canon and civil laws, dispensed by twenty-six ordinaries -easily responsible to Parliament for any deviation from the rule of law-conceive we should become exposed to the mere arbitrary government of a numerous Presbytery who, together with their ruling elders, will arise to near forty thousand church Remon 1641 PRESBYTERIANISM. 393 governors, and with their adherents must needs bear so great a sway in the commonwealth that, if future inconvenience shall be found in that government, we humbly offer to consideration how these shall be reducible by parliaments, how consistent with a monarchy, and how dangerously conducible to an anarchy which we have just cause to pray against, as fearing the consequences would prove the utter loss of learning and laws, which must necessarily produce an extermination of nobility, gentry, and order, if not of religion." The very Root-and-Branch men in the House of Commons were as sensible of the danger as the Cheshire petitioners. Milton had hardly the patience to seek for an answer to the objection 'whether a greater inconvenience would not grow from the corruption of ar.y other discipline than from episcopacy.' 66 First," he tells us, "constitute what is right, and of itself it will discover and rectify that which swerves, and easily remedy the pretended fear of having a pope in every parish, unless we call the zealous and meek censure of the Church a popedom, which whoso does, let him advise how he can reject the pastorly rod and sheephook of Christ, and those cords of love, and not fear to fall under the iron sceptre of His anger that will dash him in pieces like a potsherd."2 Milton cn Presby terianism. It is clear from such a paragraph as this that Milton's theories on government were no better suited to the actual England of the day than the Lady of the Comus Value of Milton's would have been at home at the Court of Henrietta pamphlets. Maria, or the Archangel Raphael in the Long Parliament. Yet not for this are they to be condemned. Their permanent value lies in the persistence with which they point to the eternal truth, that all artificial constitutional arrangements, all remodelling of authority in Church or State, all reform in law and administration, will be worthless in the absence of the high purpose and the resolute will of the individual men who are to make use of political or ecclesiastical institutions. "Love Virtue, she alone is free." Let the mind be cultivated to understand which are the paths of virtue. Let A Remonstrance against Presbytery, E. 163. 2 Of Reformation touching Church Discipline. 7 the spirit be attuned to the harmonies of heaven. The work to be done for the soul and intelligence of the individual Englishman was far greater than anything that parliaments and presbyteries could accomplish for the external regulation of the community. Milton's idea of Even in Milton's commendation of Presbytery there was something which made for liberty. His idea of Church discipline was merely one of meek and gentle admonition. In hin the Independent was already visible beneath liberty. the Presbyterian. The teaching of the professed Separatists or Independents was already to be heard in London. Some of those who had been exiled to Holland had returned, and were once more preaching in London or elsewhere. Others were on their way from New England. It was not, however, the teaching of these men which caused alarm. They had their peculiar views about the constitution of the Church, but, in other respects, their doctrine was very like that of other Puritan divines of the day. That which gave offence was the more than Puritan arrogance with which they drew Lay preaching. the line between their own sanctified congregations and the apostate churches which found room for the sinful and profane, as well as the rapid growth of unauthorised congregations in London, and the assumption by tradesmen and artificers of the office of the preacher. Naturally these men adopted the Independent or Separatist scheme, which did not set apart the ministry as a distinct office, and it was equally natural that ministers, whatever might be their opinions on the subject of Episcopacy, should join in denouncing the hatters and the felt-makers who fancied themselves capable of giving instruction without having received an education which would fit them for their work. Still greater offence was given when it was known that women sometimes took upon themselves to preach, and the words of St. Paul, “I suffer not a woman to teach," were quoted with great unction by many whose lives were not always regulated in conformity with other parts of the teaching of the Apostle. A very general senti A list of six women preachers is given in A Discovery of Sin, E. 166. |