Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/72

 distill'd quintessence, a pure elixar of mischief, pestilent alike to all, I shal shew briefly, ere I conclude, that the Prelats, as they are to the subjects a calamity, so are they the greatest underminers and betrayers of the Monarch, to whom they seem to be most favourable. I cannot better liken the state and person of a King then to that mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplin'd from his birth in the precepts and the practice of Temperance and Sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks the laws waving and curling about his god like shoulders. And while he keeps them about him undiminisht and unshorn, he may with the jaw-bone of an Asse, that is, with the word of his meanest officer suppresse and put to confusion thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his head among the strumpet flatteries of Prelats, while he sleeps and thinks no harme, they wickedly shaving off an those bright and waighty tresses of his laws, and just prerogatives which were his ornament and strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent councels, which as those Philistims put out the fair, and farre-sighted eyes of his natural discerning, and make him grinde in the prison house of their sinister ends and practices upon him. Till he knowing this prelatical rasor to have bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant halr, the golden beames of Law and Right; and they sternly shook, thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great affliction to himselfe. This is the sum of their loyal service to Kings; yet these are the men that stil cry the King, the King, the Lords Anointed. We grant it, and wonder how they came to light upon any thing so true; and wonder more, if Kings be the Lords Anointed, how they dare thus oyle over and besmeare so holy an unction with the corrupt and putrid oyntment of their base flatteries; which while they smooth the skin, strike inward and envenom the life blood. What fidelity Kings can expect from Prelats both examples past, and our present experience of their doings at this day, whereon is grounded all that hath bin said, may sufffice to inform us. And if they be such clippers of regal power and shavers of the Laws, how they stand affected to the law giving Parlament, your selves, worthy Peeres and Commons, can best testifie; the current of whose glorious and immortal actions hath bin only oppos'd by the obscure and pernicious designes of the Prelats: until their insolence broke