VI MILTON II.-ECCLESIASTICAL AND I MILTON'S first entrance into controversy was as an ecclesiastical reformer. He would fain have been a messenger of gladness and contentment to his countrymen, the poet that he was born to be: "but when God commands to take a trumpet, and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say, or what he shall conceal." His quarrel with the Church of England arose from his conviction that, under the rule of Laud, it had become destructive of spiritual liberty and yet did not gain in spiritual vigour. His conception of a Christian commonwealth assuredly could not err on the side of laxity. "Alas, sir!" he writes, "a commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body." Wisdom, virtue, magnanimity, likeness to to God, enjoin and require national as well as individual self-government. The invisible divine life must be made external, not in ornament but in something that more fitly expresses it-in conduct. Is there to be discipline in the home, discipline in the State, and no discipline, or an infirm and servile one, in the Church? "There is not that thing in the world of more grave and urgent importance throughout the whole life of man than is discipline; . . . she is that which with her musical cords preserves and holds all the parts thereof together." Its function is not so much to repress as to strengthen and develop: Certainly discipline is not only the removal of disorder, but if any visible shape can be given to divine things, the very visible shape and image of Virtue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walks, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to mortal ears." But sound discipline in things spiritual must itself be spiritual. Fines, exactions, nose slittings, earcroppings were not regarded by Milton as the methods of Christ or of His apostles; the extreme punishment of the Church, or of its instigating, can be no more than the withdrawal of spiritual communion. Its officers are to be distinguished not by worldly titles and carnal pomp but by brotherly love, matchless temperance, frequent fasting, incessant prayer and preaching, continual watchings and labours, truly apostolical distinctions. To one who sees with purged and lucid vision, the grandeur of religion is degraded, not enhanced, by mundane power and splendour: "So long as the Church, in true imitation of Christ, can be content to ride upon an ass, carrying herself and her government along in a mean and simple guise, she may be, as he is, a lion of the tribe of Judah; and in her humility all men with loud hosannas will confess her greatness. But when, despising the mighty operation of the Spirit by the weak things of the world, she thinks to make herself bigger and more considerable by using the way of civil force and jurisdiction, as she sits upon this lion she changes into an ass, and instead of hosannas every man pelts her with stones and dirt." A part of the policy of Laud was to work from without inwards; through uniformity, enforced by pains and penalties, he trusted that unity might in the end be attained or at the least promoted. As regards dogma, he was more liberal than many of his Puritan adversaries; as regards ceremonial order, he would tolerate no irregularity. Milton desired to work from within outwards; religion should indeed incarnate itself in visible acts, it should obtain expression and externality, not in ornament or symbol, but in deeds and lives of righteousness. With a profound sense of the majesty of religion, all glorious within, he believed that its dignity is heightened by the fact that its external habit is plain and homespun. The beauty of holiness is seen aright only in the living temple; shall altars, and cloths, and vessels, be profaned by the touch of a lay Christian, who is himself the adopted child of the Divine Father? If the feet of him that bringeth good tidings are beautiful, how shall the "spinstry" of ceremonies add to their decency? Milton, a poet and a lover of comely things, is ready to sacrifice the lower beauty of ornament in order that the invisible beauty may shine forth with intenser radiance. The "chaste and modest veil" of Christ's Gospel "surrounded with celestial beams" loses something of its brightness if it be overlaid with a "flaring tire." Milton thought of the intercourse between God and the soul as, on the part of man, an indefatigable soaring upward. There are two humilities-that which bows. and that which soars, the humility of a servant who looks down, the humility of a son who gazes up. Milton's humility invigorates itself in the effort to ascend. He would not prostrate himself in the presence of material symbols, but would enter as a glad child into the courts of heaven. He suspects a rich ceremonial because it seems to him a specious mode of easing the stress of devout effort; the soul, with flagging pinions, "shifts off from herself the labour of high soaring." He honours the senses; but he finds within himself a faculty-not the intellect, but the religious faculty-which cleaves its way past things of sense, and communes with the unseen. "Our understanding," he writes in the Letter on Education, "cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature." That is God's way of utilising the senses for religious purposes; but to manufacture an artificial body of material symbols, neither found in nature nor authorised by the Divine word, seemed to him the way to check or hamper the soul in its upward flight. Voluntary humility before material objects styled sacred belongs, as Milton conceives, rather to a religion of mingled fear and self-will than of love and genuine self-abandonment. The true attitude of the soul is filial, cheerful, and courageous; son and Father may meet face to face, without servile crouchings or the veils of piebald frippery. Such was the Puritan position; but it is enlarged and strengthened by the genius of its defender. He was no enemy of art, as were some of those who stood upon his side; he was no enemy of pleasure. But, although his approved polity in state and church was in theory democratic, Milton was deficient in popular sympathies. He found in the sacred writings magnificent examples of lyric poetry, as well as of tragedy (the Apocalypse of St John) and of pastoral. But in the Sunday afternoon dance of villagers upon the green, permitted by the Declaration of Sports, he saw only a provocation to drunkenness and lust. Instead of desiring that recreations should be suppressed by authority, he desired that the pleasures of England might be regarded by the government as part of a public schooling, and might be studied and superintended with a view to their just honour and stateliness: "It were happy for the commonwealth if our magistrates, as in those famous governments of old, would take into their care, not only the deciding of our contentious lawcases and brawls, but the managing of our public sports and festival pastimes; that they might be . . . such as may inure and harden our bodies by martial exercises to all war-like skill and performance, and may civilise, adorn, and make discreet our minds by the learned and affable meeting of frequent academies, and the procurement of wise and artful recitations, sweetened with |