been hastily pulled down; the new government offices
that were to replace it had as yet been but partially built, and
commanded no general approval. Considered as a social organisation,
moreover, the Church throughout large parts of the country had fallen
into a state not unlike decay. Richard Baxter, whose testimony there is
no sufficient reason to reject, tells of its state in Shropshire during
the years of his youth, from 1615 onwards:--"We lived in a country that
had but little preaching at all: In the Village where I was born there
was four Readers successively in Six years time, ignorant Men, and two of
them immoral in their lives; who were all my School-masters. In the
Village where my Father lived, there was a Reader of about Eighty years
of Age that never preached, and had two Churches about Twenty miles
distant: His Eyesight failing him, he said Common-Prayer without Book;
but for the Reading of the Psalms and Chapters he got a Common Thresher
and Day-Labourer one year, and a Taylor another year: (for the Clerk
could not read well): And at last he had a Kinsman of his own (the
excellentest Stage-player in all the Country, and a good Gamester and
good Fellow) that got Orders and supplied one of his Places.... After him
another Neighbour's Son took Orders, when he had been a while an
Attorney's Clerk, and a common Drunkard, and tipled himself into so great
Poverty that he had no other way to live.... These were the
School-masters of my Youth ... who read Common Prayer on Sundays and Holy
Days, and taught School and tipled on the Weekdays, and whipt the Boys
when they were drunk, so that we changed them very oft. Within a few
miles about us were near a dozen more Ministers that were near Eighty
years old apiece, and never preached; poor ignorant Readers, and most of
them of Scandalous Lives." Some few there were, Baxter admits, who
preached in the neighbourhood, but any one who went to hear them "was
made the Derision of the Vulgar Rabble under the odious Name of a
_Puritane_."

In one of his Latin letters written from Cambridge, Milton himself speaks
of the ignorance of those designed for the profession of divinity, how
they knew little or nothing of literature and philosophy. The high
prelacy and ritualism of Laud on the one hand, the Puritan movement on
the other, each in some measure a protest against this state of things,
were at fierce variance with each other, and Milton's ear, from his youth
upward, was