... the end for which the law was instituted, namely, the love of God and our neighbour, is by no means to be abolished; it is the tablet of the law, so to speak, that is alone changed, its injunctions being now written by the Spirit in the hearts of believers. .

Consequently the judgment will take place according to an individual rule for each: "the rule of judgment will be the conscience of each individual." "

A curious application of this theory, which is a claim for the legitimacy of the instincts of each regenerated man, is the admission of polygamy. Milton had probably come to consider, from his own experience, that having three wives successively came to much the same thing as having them simultaneously. He demonstrates at length that polygamy was allowed to the Hebrews and ends with the aphorism, "The practice of the saints is the best interpretation of the commandments." "

B. Religious liberty; no priests

Every believer has a right to interpret the Scriptures for himself, inasmuch as he has the Spirit for his guide, and the mind of Christ is in him.R

Scripture is the sole judge of controversies; or rather, every man is to decide for himself through its aid, under the guidance of the Spirit of God."

... the same Spirit which originally dictated them, enlightening us inwardly, through faith and love.10

And Scripture itself is

not but by the Spirit understood.11

Christ is in each of us; Christ is in the communion of the Saints, and governs his Church directly, without need of any other government:

Christ hath a government of his own, sufficient of itself to all his ends and purposes in governing his church, but much different from that of the civil magistrate . . . it deals only with the inward man and his actions, which are all spiritual, and to outward force not liable.12

The consequence is the suppression of the ecclesiastical ministry. Professional priests are not only useless, but harmful:

A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.18

All the members of the Church are priests, and the socalled "priests priests" are usurpers:

And this all Christians ought to know, that the title of clergy St. Peter gave to all God's people, till pope Higinus and the succeeding prelates took it from them, appropriating that name to themselves and their priests only; and condemning the rest of God's inheritance to an injurious and alienate condition of laity, they separated from them by local partitions in churches. . . . .. Although these usurpers could not so presently overmaster the liberties and lawful titles of God's freeborn church; but that Origen, being yet a layman, expounded the Scriptures publicly. . . .14

C. Intellectual liberty: no censors

Liberty is equally essential to the operations of the mind. Each man is to search for truth in his own way, for all we can know is made up of fragments of truth, and therefore the search must proceed in all directions. We need but set down a few arguments from the Areopagitica.

12 Treatise of Civil Power, in Prose Works, II, 533.

18 Areopagitica, in Prose Works, II, 85.

14 Reason of Church Government, in Prose Works, II, 493. See above, pp. 77-78, for the development of these ideas.

Truth is not known in its entirety:

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape glorious to look on: . . . then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, lords and commons, nor ever shall do. . . . Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.15

Besides, on many points truth is not settled yet and therefore no law is possible:

Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one? What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike herself? 16

Lastly- Milton hits here upon one of the ideas made most use of by Cardinal Newman (let us mark one more point where he is in agreement with his most hated adversaries, the Catholics) - truth changes with the ages of mankind:

For who knows not that truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness.17

15 Prose Works, II, 89.

16 Ibid., II, 96–97.

17 Ibid., II, 96.

Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity, and tradition.18

The necessity for liberty of thinking is thus solidly established. Milton points out that, besides, political liberty is necessary to the full development of intellectual life. Thus, in Italy, the fall of liberty brought intellectual decadence.19 But political liberty is the main object of the prose works.

D. Political liberty: no tyrants

Milton applies to politics his fundamental principles. Man is a part of God; therefore he is free. But he is free only when reason dominates over the passions in him; otherwise, he is not "of Christ," and he has no right to external liberty.

Milton develops those ideas in the fine pages at the end of the Defensio secunda. Institutions in themselves have no value; the vote has a meaning only if the citizens are enlightened and freed from passions. Man must first govern himself, and then choose as leaders men who can govern themselves:

For it is of no little consequence, O citizens, by what principles you are governed, either in acquiring liberty, or in retaining it when acquired. And unless that liberty which is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take away, which alone is the fruit of piety, of justice, of temperance, and unadulterated virtue, shall have taken deep root in your minds and hearts, there will not long be wanting one who will snatch from you by treachery what you have acquired by arms. War has made many great whom peace makes small. If after being released from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace, if your peace and your liberty be a state of warfare, if war be your only virtue, the summit of your praise, you 19 See above, p. 75.

18 Ibid., II, 85.

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will, believe me, soon find peace the most adverse to your interests. Your peace will be only a more distressing war; and that which you imagined liberty will prove the worst of slavery. Unless by the means of piety, not frothy and loquacious, but operative, unadulterated, and sincere, you clear the horizon of the mind from those mists of superstition which arise from the ignorance of true religion, you will always have those who will bend your necks to the yoke as if you were brutes, who, notwithstanding all your triumphs, will put you up to the highest bidder, as if you were mere booty made in war; and will find an exuberant source of wealth in your ignorance and superstition. Unless you will subjugate the propensity to avarice, to ambition, and sensuality, and expel all luxury from yourselves and from your families, you will find that you have cherished a more stubborn and intractable despot at home, than you ever encountered in the field; and even your very bowels will be continually teeming with an intolerable progeny of tyrants. Let these be the first enemies whom you subdue; this constitutes the campaign of peace; these are triumphs, difficult indeed, but bloodless; and far more honourable than those trophies which are purchased only by slaughter and by rapine. Unless you are victors in this service, it is in vain that you have been victorious over the despotic enemy in the field. . . . But from such an abyss of corruption into which you so readily fall, no one, not even Cromwell himself, nor a whole nation of Brutuses, if they were alive, could deliver you if they would, or would deliver you if they could. For who would vindicate your right of unrestrained suffrage, or of choosing what representatives you like best, merely that you might elect the creatures of your own faction, whoever they might be, or him, however small might be his worth, who would give you the most lavish feasts, and enable you to drink to the greatest excess? Thus not wisdom and authority, but turbulence and gluttony, would soon exalt the vilest miscreants from our taverns and our brothels, from our towns and villages, to the rank and dignity of senators. For, should the management of the republic be entrusted to persons to whom no one would willingly entrust the management of his private concerns; and the treasury of the state be left to the care of those who had lavished their own fortunes in an infamous prodigality? Should they have the charge of the public purse, which they would soon convert into a private, by their unprincipled peculations? Are they fit to be the legislators of a