6 min 3 wer CONTENTS. 938 1889 PAGES Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England, and the Causes that hitherto have 49-108 109-182 Of Education. A Letter to Samuel Hartlib A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. 393-422% The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Com- monwealth, and the Excellence thereof, com- pared with the Inconveniences and Dangers of 542 423-446 6455 MILTON. Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour; We are selfish men; Oh, raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea Pure as the naked heavens, najestic, free, -WORDSWORTH, INTRODUCTION. THIS HIS volume contains all those Prose Writings of Milton in which he set forth, as he himself thought best, his views on all that is most vital to the body politic. The people make the state, and their well-being is dependent chiefly upon their religious life, their home life, the right training of their children and a civil government adapted to their highest needs. I have grouped Milton's papers under headings, which show that they cover all this ground, and deal only with these essentials of citizenship. There are omitted from this volume all the writings in which Milton replied to the opponents of his views. The controversies of 250 years ago travelled by many paths in which we care no longer to assert a right of way. At all times, the Reformer who is answering opponents has his course of argument determined by the reason or the unreason of other men. Forms of reply dependent upon accidents of the attack are only to be read with measured judgment by those who have read the attack also; and often when we have read both, we have heard a sound of battle in the air that has appealed to our imaginations and disturbed our judgment. The battle of opinion rolls forward to new ground from century to century. The great truths are immutable, the applications of them vary with the change of time. But when a writer who looks to the highest aims of life and is concerned only with its highest interests has resolved to set forth opinions to the world, and having, as Milton says, summoned up all his reason and deliberation to assist him, searched, meditated, been industrious, and likely consulted and conferred with his judicious friends, he arranges the expression of his thought as he best can, he meets as he goes the objections that are likely to arise from men of differing opinion, ranging all to the utmost of his own capacity into one clear enforcement of what he thinks is for the public good. Of course, also, he applies as he goes his principles,-immutable, if they be true,-to mutable condition of the time for which he writes. In that way Milton wrote the pieces that are here collected. Of every argument that seemed to strike too boldly against custom and tradition he had to continue the defence against hot controversialists at a time when controversy was a graceless work. And even now it is of little grace. We have not learnt yet how much that most necessary factor in the progress of the world would gain in reason by the loss of passion, how much force there is in fairness, and that only poverty of spirit turns debate to quarrel. Milton's "Eikonoklastes" is an answer to “Eikon Basilike,” following that work section by section. The famous Latin works in defence of the People of England were replies to attacks. But the defence in each case is of principles which Milton had set forth in his own way, and upon his own motion, in his treatise on "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." Only that treatise falls, therefore, within the plan of this collection of Milton's reasonings upon the principles that should control the settlement of Church and State. To bring the whole collection within the compass of one volume it has been necessary that the suggestion of a plan for the establishment of a Free Commonwealth should be given at the close of the book in smaller type, and that whatever may be said by way of annotation should be confined to the Introduction. Inasmuch as the purpose of this volume is to enable many readers to know clearly for themselves what Milton really taught in his prose writings, and inasmuch as he wrote with an emphasis that made his meaning upon each point in the argument entirely clear, there may, after all, be some advantage in the enforced absence of notes. Notes might possibly divert too much attention from |