diligence that manures and improves his ministerial gifts. In the primitive times many, before ever they had received ordination from the Apostles, had done the Church noble service. It is but an orderly form of receiving a man already fitted, and committing to him a particular charge ; the employment of preaching is as holy and far more excellent; the care also and judgment to be used in the winning of souls is an ability above that which is required in ordination." It is impossible in a brief review to set forth the particular controversies of the years in which these pamphlets appeared, or even to give the names of those who engaged in them. The fight was sometimes a savage one, and the "Animadversions" are in some places rough, and even scurrilous, to a degree which would not now be tolerated. Our present object is to show that while engaged in them Milton never forgot the higher purposes of his life and study, and also that, from the earliest period of his public efforts, he laid hold on first principles which could have but one outcome-namely, the attainment of the highest ground, or, as we should say now, the most advanced ground, on which political and ecclesiastical liberty can rest. Consider the extract about ordination, and the essence of the ministerial function. We can add nothing to-day to the force of such a statement. With his thoughts so based on eternal principles, what could the doctrines of the Churches be to Milton, even at the beginning of his career as a public writer? Episcopacy was being weighed in the scales of discussion, and Milton had long ago judged it. When Episcopacy had fallen, came the attempt to put Presbytery in its place. Milton's fourth pamphlet, as Mr. Masson points out, is in favour of Presbyterianism, but rather from the necessity of the argument than from anything else.

At the very outset of his pamphlet Milton declares the question respecting Church Government to be whether it ought to be presbyterial or prelatical; nay, shortly afterwards he has

a sentence which shows that at this time there was little dream either in his mind, or in that of the people around him, of the possibility of any form of Church Government that should not be definable as one or the other of these two (Vol. II., p. 376).

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But was there not an element in the question which for the time shut out the possibility of any other form? We mean "uniformity" in religion; and in deliberating on behalf of a national establishment, this element ruled in the minds of nearly all men. How earnestly the religious men who sat in the Long Parliament regarded "uniformity essential to national religion, we all know; and how much was expected from the Westminster Assembly of Divines we can learn more readily from Professor Masson's second volume than we could possibly learn elsewhere. If uniformity in religion was necessary, and was to be secured, Presbyterianism seemed the likeliest form it could take. A most interesting list of all the persons who were chosen to sit in the Westminster Assembly will be found on pages 515 to 524 of Masson, Vol. II. In view of Milton's ultimate choice of the principle of Independency, we will pursue this question, with Mr: Masson's assistance, a little more fully.

After describing the falling off or withdrawing of the Bishops and other adherents of Episcopacy from the Assembly, Professor Masson says:-"In respect of theological doctrine, for example, the Assembly, as it was then left, was perfectly unanimous. They were almost to a man Calvinists or Anti-Arminians, pledged by their antecedents to such a revision of the Articles as should make the national creed more distinctly Calvinistic than before.

On the question of Church Government the Assembly knew itself from the first to be divided into parties." This division became of the utmost importance, for on the result of the struggle between Presbyterianism and Independency depended the fate of England. Mr. Masson's section, entitled, "Presbyterianism and In

dependency in July, 1643: their prospects in the Westminster Assembly," throws so much interest on this topic that we make no excuse for transcribing a portion of it :

I regard the arrival of Roger Williams in London about Midsummer, 1643, as the importation into England of the very quintessence or last distillation of that notion of Church Independency which England had originated, but Holland and America had worked out. Our history of Independency in all its forms on to this quintessence or last distillation of it in the mind of a fervid Welsh New-Englander, who might now be seen, alone or in young Vane's company, hanging about the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, has not been without preconceived and deliberate purpose. For, in most of our existing studies and accounts of England's great Revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century, I know not a blunder more fatal, more full of causes of misapprehension and unfair judgment, than that which consists in treating Independency as a sudden new phenomenon of 1643, or thereabouts, when the Westminster Assembly met. Not so, as we have seen. For sixty years before 1643 Independency had been a traditional form of Anti-Prelacy in the English popular mind, competing with the somewhat older Anti-Prelatic theory of Presbyterianism, and though not possessing the same respectability of numbers and of social weight, yet lodged inexpugnably in native depths, and intense with memories of pain and wrong. It did happen, in 1643, when Prelacy was removed from the nation, and the question was what was to be substituted, that this native tradition of Independency found itself dashed against the other tradition of Presbyterianism, in such conditions that Independency seemed the pretender and upstart, while Presbyterianism seemed the rightful heir. This arose partly from the fact that Presbyterianism had mass and respectability in her favour, was at home on the spot, and had her titles ready; whereas Independency had been a wanderer on the Continent and in the Colonies, had contracted an uncouth and sunburnt look, had been preceded by ugly reports of her behaviour in foreign parts, had changed her name several times, and was not at once prepared with her pedigree and vouchers. Partly, however, it arose from the omnipotence at that moment of Scottish example and advice in England. Anyhow, for the moment, Independency was at a disadvantage. She seemed even to doubt

her chance of obtaining a hearing. Nevertheless, she was to be heard, and fully, in the course of time. Not a form of Independency, not a variety in her development that has been described in the preceding narrative, from Brown's original English Separatism, on through Robinson's Congregationalism or SemiSeparatism antagonising Smyth's extreme Separatism and SeBaptism in Holland, and so to the Consolidated Robinsonian Independency of the New England Church, with its outjets in Mrs. Hutchinson's Antinomianism and Roger Williams's absolute Individualism, but were to have their appearances or equivalents in the coming controversy in England, and to play into the current of English life (Vol. II., pp. 602—3).

This extract is enough for our present purpose, which is to show that very unexpected" developments" besides those suggested in our extract were to come into play. That Milton should break with the Assembly might be expected; but what actually did occur was a personal matter which is the most extraordinary circumstance in the whole of Milton's life. An unhappy marriage was the occasion of Milton's personal conflict with the ecclesiastical leaders of the time. When he became a "Divorcer" the whole weight of the religious indignation of England was against him, and he was driven into Independency by a kind of moral necessity,

-a power sufficient for the purpose, even supposing that the progress of his inquiries and the turn of his mind had not been leading him in the same direction. The disturbance in Milton's imaginary career of pure contemplation and literary labour by political affairs is not a greater "interference" in his life than that which his marriage and its consequences produced. The elevated tone-we might almost say superhuman or angelic character-of Milton's ideas in regard to the relations of the sexes, and his grand doctrine of "the sublime notion and high mystery" of personal purity-for the vindication whereof he deserves eternal honour-were put to a severe trial in his own unfortunate experience. In his thitry-fifth year, nine years after the production of "Comus," he went into Oxfordshire to visit the Powells, old

friends of his family, but strong Royalists, and he returned to London with a bride of seventeen-the girl Mary Powell, of whom we really know nothing personal as to her character or abilities, but about whom much may be inferred from the conduct of her husband and from unmistakable allusions in his writings. Professor Masson has given us the details with care and delicacy, and has brought out all the references which Milton's writings can be made to yield on the subject whether in prose or verse. Enough to say here, that Milton's ideas of the married state did not find themselves fulfilled in his experience, and that he did find the materials out of which to lay down new claims for personal liberty which found vent in his pamphlets on the subject of divorce. By these publications he broke altogether with the Presbyterian party; and at the same time, and during the publication of the divorce tracts, he defied the Ordinances of Parliament and the principles of the Assembly by the publication of the most magnificent of his prose works, the "Areopagitica, or speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing." In six years from the time of his return to England, Milton had placed himself ahead of Assemblies and Parliaments, and of the public opinion of his country. By the close of the year 1645 he had fought the battles of liberty in religion, in domestic life, and in public speaking and printing, and had gained a victory in every field as complete as that which Cromwell gained in the same year at Naseby over Episcopacy and absolute Monarchy. As Cromwell stood first in the rising Republic as the representative of statesmanship and military glory, Milton stood by his side as the representative of civil, social, and religious liberty. The effects of the publication of the "Areopagitica" are described by Masson in his third volume, and we borrow from it a passage which sums up Milton's position at the time of which we have just been speaking:

On the whole, then, Milton's position among his countrymen