that there was much room for improvement in the higher education of an Englishman, and Hartlib asked him to sketch an ideal of his own.

But the chief care of Milton as a writer in 1644 was bestowed upon his "Areopagitica." On the 11th of July 1637 a decree of the Star Chamber had increased strictness of licensing. It had contained formally the limitation of the whole numbers of Master Printers to twenty and of type founders to four, with strict provisions for watching, searching, seizing, and suppressing. The Star Chamber was abolished, but on the 9th of March 1643 an Order of the House of Commons gave to a Committee for Examinations, or to any four of them, like power. Taking as his model a Greek oration,-the Areopagitic discourse in which Isocrates sought to press on the Athenian Areopagus reform in its body--Milton, whose aim was to persuade the English Areopagus to cancel one of its own Orders, gave the name of Areopagitica to his defence of the liberty of unlicensed printing. It was published in November 1644.

Milton took no part in the contest with the King. When it was over, there was question of a people's right to bring a king to trial. He then published what is the next piece in this volume, "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" upon the main issue in the constitutional question of a king's responsibility. A subject can be tried for treason to a king; can also a king be tried for treason to his people, and condemned if he be guilty. From 1649 to 1689 the problem of the limit of authority was at the heart of much of our best literature, and this is Milton's way of answering it.

Here we might end, but the last section of this volume serves to show that, ten years later, Milton's argument for Civil and Religious Liberty stood firm among the ruins of the Commonwealth. H. M.

CARISBROOKE, September, 1889.

GOD AND MAN.

D

OF

REFORMATION TOUCHING CHURCH DISCIPLINE IN ENGLAND,

AND THE

CAUSES THAT HITHERTO HAVE HINDERED IT.

IN TWO BOOKS.

WRITTEN TO A FRIEND.

THE FIRST BOOK.

SIR,-Amidst those acep and retired thoughts which with

every man Christianly instructed ought to be most frequent, of God and of his miraculous ways and works amongst men, and of our Religion and works to be performed to him; after the story of our Saviour Christ, suffering to the lowest bent of weakness in the flesh, and presently triumphing to the highest pitch of glory in the spirit, which drew up his body also, till we in both be united to him in the revelation of his kingdoin, I do not know of anything more worthy to take up the whole passion of pity on the one side, and joy on the other, than to consider first the foul and sudden corruption, and then, after many a tedious age, the long deferred but much more wonderful and happy Reformation of the Church in these latter days. Sad it is to think how that doctrine of the Gospel, planted by teachers divinely inspired, and by them winnowed and sifted from the chaff of overdated ceremonies, and refined to such a spiritual height and temper of purity and

knowledge of the Creator, that the body and all the circumstances of time and place were purified by the affections of the regenerate soul, and nothing left impure but sin;-faith needing not the weak and fallible office of the senses to be either the ushers or interpreters of heavenly.mysteries, save where our Lord himself in his sacraments ordained;—that such a doctrine should, through the grossness and blindness of her professors, and the fraud of deceivable traditions, drag so downwards as to backslide one way into the Jewish beggary of old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry, attributing purity or impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the spirit to the outward and customary eye-service of the body, as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual. They began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea, the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form. Urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence and worship circumscribed, they hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from •Aaron's old wardrobe, or the flamen's vestry. Then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his 'lurries, till the soul by this means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downward, and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcass to plod on in the old road and drudging trade of outward conformity. And here, out of question, from her perverse conceiting of God and holy things, she had fallen to believe no God at all, had not custom and the worm of conscience nipped her incredulity. Hence to all the duties of evangelical grace, instead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness which our new