Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/58

 med'cin ordaine'd of God both for the publik and privat good of man, who consisting of two parts the inward and the outward, was by the eternall providence left under two sorts of cure, the Church and the Magistrat. The Magistrat hath only to deale with the outward part, I mean not of the body alone, but of the mind in all her outward acts, which in Scripture is call'd the outward man. So that it would be helpfull to us if we might borrow such autority as the Rhetoricians by patent may give us, with a kind of Promethean skill to shape and fashion this outward man into the similitude of a body, and set him visible before us; imagining the inner man only as the soul. Thus then the civill Magistrat looking only upon the outward man (I say as a Magistrat, for what he doth further, he doth it as a member of the Church) if he find in his complexion, skin, or outward temperature the signes and marks, or in his doings the effects of injustice, rapine, lust, cruelty, or the like, sometimes he shuts up as in frenetick, or infectious diseases; or confines within dores, as in every sickly estate. Sometimes he shaves by penalty, or mulct, or els to cool and take down those luxuriant humors which wealth and excesse have caus'd to abound. Otherwhiles he seres, he cauterizes, he scarifies, lets blood, and finally for utmost remedy cuts off. The patients which mostanend are brought into his hospital are such as are farre gon, and beside themselves (unlessee they be falsly accus'd) so that force is necessary to tame and quiet them in their unruly fits, before they can be made capable of a more human cure. His general end is the outward peace and wel-fare of the Commonwealth and civil happines in this life. His particular end in every man is, by the infliction of pain, dammage, and disgrace, that the senses and common perceivance might carry this message to the soul within, that it is neither easefull, profitable, nor praisworthy in this life to doe evill. Which must needs tend to the good of man, whether he be to live or die; and be undoubtedly the first means to a natural man, especially an offender, which might open his eyes to a higher consideration of good and evill, as it is taught in religion. This is seen in the often penitence of those that suffer, who, had they scapt, had gon on sinning to an immeasurable heap, which is one of the extreamest punishments. And this is all that the civil Magistrat, as so being, confers to the healing of mans mind, working only by terrifying plaisters upon the rind & orifice of the sore, and by all outward appliances, as the Logicians say, a posteriori, at the effect, and not from the cause: not once touching the inward