Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/242

222 without licence an enlarged version of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which had appeared in 1642, and he followed it up with two expository and one controversial pamphlet on the same subject. The boldness which the Divorce pamphlets revealed did not forsake Milton as the Rebellion advanced. He identified himself with the extreme wing of the Independents, placed his faith in the strong man Cromwell, and became the champion of regicide in pamphlets, Latin and English. Of the former the most famous was the Defensio pro Populo Anglicano (1651) against Claude Somaise or Salmasius, of the latter the Eikonoklastes (1649) and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). At the very moment of the Restoration he published his Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), denouncing servitude to kings and planning government by a perpetual parliament presiding over almost independent county councils.

Through Milton's prose pamphlets runs the same double strain—the classical and the biblical—which blend and conflict in his poetry. On matters of religion and church government he is for the Bible as the sole guide, without respect for tradition or councils, interpreted by the individual reason subject to no authority that has any power beyond instruction, admonition, and reproof. In matters political he can appeal to the Bible also. Kings are unlawful because Christ forbade his followers to exercise lordship; but his ground principle is that of the Levellers, who,