world expires, and
erelong a new world rises. The Wars which signalize the new period,
contrast deeply with those which heretofore tore the land. Those were the
factions of high lineages. Now, thought seizes the weapons of earthly
warfare. The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the
country--the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by
the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms
into men's hands. The highest of all the interests of the human
being--higher than all others, as eternity excels time--Religion--is
equally debated. The Protestant church is beleaguered by hostile
sects--the Reformation subjected to the demand for a more searching and
effective reform. Creed, worship, ecclesiastical discipline and
government, all come into debate. A thraldom of opinion--a bondage of
authority, that held for many centuries the nation bound together in no
powerless union, is, upon the sudden, broken up. Men will know why they
obey and why they believe; and human laws and divine truths are searched,
as far as the wit of man is capable, to the roots. It is the spirit of the
new time that has broken forth, and begins ambitiously, and riotously, to
try its powers, but nobly, magnanimously, and heroically too. MILTON owned
and showed himself a son of the time. Gifted with powers eminently fitted
for severe investigation--apt for learning, and learned beyond most
men--of a temper adverse and rebellious to an assumed and ungrounded
control--large-hearted and large-minded to comprehend the diverse
interests of men--personally fearless--devout in the highest and boldest
sense of the word; namely, as acknowledging no supreme law but from
heaven, and as confiding in the immediate communication of divine
assistance to the faithful servants of heaven--possessing, moreover, in
amplest measure, that peculiar endowment of sovereign poets which enables
them to stand up as the teachers of a lofty and tender wisdom, as moral
prophets to the species, the clear faculty of profound self-inspection--he
was prepared to share in the intellectual strife and change of that day,
even had some interposing, pacific angel charmed away from the bosom of
the land all other warfare and revolution--and to shine in that age's
work, even had the muse never smiled upon his cradled forehead, never laid
the magical murmurs of song on his chosen lips. He was a politician, a
theologian of his age--amidst