Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/348

Rh 330 MILTON divines and two Scottish lay commissioners were added to the Westminster Assembly and became leaders there. Whether Milton s divorce tract was formally discussed in the Assembly during the first months of its sitting is unknown ; but it is certain that the London clergy, including not a few members of the Assembly, were then talking about it privately with anger and execration. That there might be no obstacle to a more public prosecu tion, Milton threw off the anonymous in a second and much enlarged edition of the tract, in February 1643-44, dedicated openly to the parliament and the Assembly. Then, for a month or two, during which the gossip about him and his monstrous doctrine was spreading more and more, he turned his attention to other subjects. Among the questions in agitation in the general ferment of opinion brought about by the civil war was that of a reform of the national system of education and especially of the universities. To this question Milton made a contribution in June 1644, in a small Tract on Education, in the form of a letter to Mr Samuel Hartlib, a German then resident in London and interesting himself busily in all philanthropic projects and schemes of social reform. In the very next month, however, July 1644, he returned to the divorce subject in a pamphlet addressed specially to the clergy and entitled The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. The outcry against him then reached its height. He was attacked in pamphlets ; he was denounced in pulpits all through London, and more than once in sermons before the two Houses of Parliament by prominent divines of the Westminster Assembly ; strenuous efforts were made to bring him within definite parliamentary censure. In the cabal formed against him for this purpose a leading part was played, at the instigation of the clergy, by the Stationers Company of London. That company, represent ing the publishers and booksellers of London, had a plea of their own against him, on the ground that his doctrine was not only immoral, but had been put forth in an illegal manner. His first divorce treatise, though published imme diately after the &quot; Printing Ordinance &quot; of the parliament of June 14, 1643, requiring all publications to be licensed for press by one of the official censors, and to be registered in the books of the Stationers Company, had been issued without licence and without registration. Complaint to this effect was made against Milton, with some others liable to the same charge of contempt of the printing ordinance, in ? petition of the Stationers to the House of Commons in August 1644; and the matter came before committee both in that House and in the Lords. It is to this circumstance that the world owes the most popular and eloquent, if not the greatest, of all Milton s prose-writings, his famous Areopagitica, a Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England. It appeared in the end of November 1644, deliberately unlicensed and unregistered, as was proper on such an occasion, and was a remonstrance addressed to the parliament, as if in an oration to them face to face, against their ordinance of June 1643 and the whole system of licensing and censorship of the press. Nobly eulogistic of the parliament in other respects, it denounced their printing ordinance as utterly unworthy of them, and of the new era of English liberties which they were initiating, and called for its repeal. Though that effect did not follow, the pamphlet virtually accomplished its purpose. The licensing system had received its death blow ; and, though the Stationers returned to the charge in another complaint to the House of Lords, Milton s offence against the press ordinance was condoned. He was still assailed in pamphlets, and found himself &quot; in a world of disesteem &quot; ; but he lived on through the winter of 1644-45 undisturbed in his house in Alderssate Street. To this period there belong, in the shape of verse, only his sonnets ix. and x., the first to some anonymous lady, and the second &quot;to the Lady Margaret Ley,&quot; with perhaps the Greek lines entitled Philosophus ad Regem Quendam. His divorce speculation, however, still occupied him : and in March 1644-45 he published simultaneously his Tetrachordon, or Expositions upon the four chief places of Scripture which treat of Marnage, and his Colasterion, a Reply to a nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In these he replied to his chief recent assailants, lay and clerical, with merciless severity. It was not merely Milton s intellectual eminence that had saved him from prosecution for his divorce heresy. A new tendency of national opinion on the church question had operated in his favour, and in favour of all forms of free speculation. There had occurred in the Westminster Assembly itself, and more largely throughout the general community, that split of English Puritanism into the two opposed varieties of Presbyterianism on the one hand and Independency or Congregationalism on the other which explains the whole subsequent history of the Puritan revo lution. Out of this theoretical discussion as to the con stitution of the church there had grown the all-important practical question of toleration. The Presbyterians insisted that the whole population of England should necessarily belong to the one national Presbyterian Church, be com pelled to attend its worship, and be subject to its discipline, while the Independents demanded that, if a Presbyterian Church should be set up as the national and state-paid church, there should at least be liberty of dissent from it, and toleration for those that chose to form themselves into separate congregations. Vehement within the West minster Assembly itself, the controversy had attained wider dimensions out of doors, and had inwrought itself in a most remarkable manner with the conduct of the war. Orthodox Presbyterian Calvinists were still the majority of the Puritan body ; but, in the new atmosphere of liberty, there had sprung up, from secret and long-suppressed seeds in the English mind, a wonderful variety of sects and denominations, mingling other elements with their Calvinism, or hardly Calvinistic at all, most of them, it is true, fervidly Biblical and Christian after their different sorts, but not a few professing the most coolly inquisitive and sceptical spirit, and pushing their speculations to strange extremes of free-thinking. These sects, growing more and more numerous in the large towns, had become especially powerful in the English Parliamentary army. That army had, in fact, become a marching academy of advanced opinionists and theological debaters. Now, as all the new Puritan sects, differing however much among themselves, saw their existence and the perpetuity of their tenets threatened by that system of ecclesiastical uniformity which the Presbyterians proposed to establish, they had, one and all, abjured Presbyterianism, and adopted the opposite principle of Independency, with its appended principle of toleration. Hence an extraordinary conflict of policies among those who seemed to be all Parliamen tarians, all united in fighting against the king. The auxiliary Scottish army, which had come into England in January 1643-44, and had helped the English generals to beat the king in the great battle of Marston Moor in July 1644, thoiight that he had then been almost sufficiently beaten, and that the object of the Solemn League and Covenant would be best attained by bringing him to such terms as should secure an immediate Presbyterian settle ment and the suppression of the Independents and sectaries. In this the chief English commanders, such as Essex and Manchester, agreed substantially with the Scots. Cromwell, on the other hand, who was now the recognized head of the army Independents, did not think that the king had