e vernal[5], he cannot
well have commenced "Paradise Lost" before the death of Cromwell, or
have made very great progress with it ere his conception of his duty
called him away to questions of ecclesiastical policy. The one point on
which he had irreconcilably differed from Cromwell was that of a State
Church; Cromwell, the practical man, perceiving its necessity, and
Milton, the idealist, seeing only its want of logic. Unfortunately, this
inconsequence existed only for the few thinkers who could in that age
rise to the acceptance of Milton's premises. In his "Treatise of Civil
Power in Ecclesiastical Causes," published in February, 1659, he
emphatically insists that the civil magistrate has neither the right nor
the power to interfere in matters of religion, and concludes: "The
defence only of the Church belongs to the magistrate. Had he once learnt
not further to concern himself with Church affairs, half his labour
might be spared and the commonwealth better tended." It is to be
regretted that he had not entered upon this great subject at an earlier
period. The little tract, addressed to the Republican members of
Parliament, is designedly homely in style, and the magnificence of
Milton's diction is still further tamed down by the necessity of
resorting to dictation. It is nevertheless a powerful piece of argument,
in its own sphere of abstract reason unanswerable, and only questionable
in that lower sphere of expediency which Milton disdained. In the
following August appeared a sequel with the sarcastic title,
"Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the
Church." The recipe is simple and efficacious--cease to hire them, and
they will cease to be hirelings. Suppress all ecclesiastical endowments,
and let the clergyman be supported by free-will offerings. The fact that
this would have consigned about half the established clergy to beggary
does not trouble him; nor were they likely to be greatly troubled by a
proposal so sublimely impracticable. Vested interests can only be
over-ridden in times of revolution, and 1659, in outward appearance a
year of anarchy, was in truth a year of reaction. For the rest, it is to
be remarked that Milton scarcely allowed the ministry to be followed as
a profession, and that his views on ecclesiastical organization had come
to coincide very nearly with those now held by the Plymouth Brethren.

There is much plausibility in Pattison's comparison of the men of the
C