ay it appears that the mistake has been all one way. "Laws are
usually worse in proportion as they are more numerous." The free spirit
of man can govern him without "a garrison upon his neck of empty and
over-dignified precepts."

Whether he treat of religion, of education, of divorce, or of civil
government, the error is always the same, a confidence too absolute in
the capacity and integrity of the reasonable soul of man. A liturgy, for
example, is intolerable, because it is a slur upon the extemporary
effusions of ministers of the Gospel. "Well may men of eminent gifts set
forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please; but to impose
them on ministers lawfully called and sufficiently tried ... is a
supercilious tyranny, impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves."
Milton, we know, did not habitually attend public worship at any of the
conventicles of the sectaries, or perhaps he might have found reason to
modify this censure.

Some of his impassioned pleadings were possibly not wholly without effect
on the politics of the time. It is interesting, at any rate, to find
Cromwell, in his letter written in 1650 to the Governor of Edinburgh
Castle, adopting one of the main arguments of the _Areopagitica_, and
enforcing it against the Presbyterians by a figure which may have been
borrowed from that tract. "Your pretended fear," he writes, "lest error
should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the
country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise
jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition that
he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge." But Cromwell never
applied his logic to the removal of the restraint upon printing, which by
this same argument Milton had judged to be "the greatest displeasure and
indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him." He was
too practical a statesman to be frightened into logic by a little paper
shot.

Logical Milton always was. He learned little or nothing from the
political events of his time. He was throughout consistent with himself;
prepared to take any risks that his advocacy might bring upon him, not
prepared to forego or modify his opinions because of human incompetence
or human imbecility. Between the consistent and unflinching Royalists on
the one hand, and the consistent and unflinching Republicans on the
other, the most of the population of England wavered and hung. But
half-measures