ny inspired outbursts of eloquence
simulating the logic that is in fact lacking to them. The following
splendid passage, for instance, and there are very many like it, merely
proves that a seat in the House of Lords is not essential to the
episcopal office, which no one ever denied. It would have considerable
force if the question involved the nineteenth century one of the Pope's
temporal sovereignty:--

"Certainly there is no employment more honourable, more worthy to
take up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free
nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of heavenly truth
from God to man, and by the faithful work of holy doctrine to
procreate a number of faithful men, making a kind of creation like
to God's by infusing his spirit and likeness into them, to their
salvation, as God did into him; arising to what climate soever he
turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with
healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and
gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a
delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge and good works.
Can a man thus employed find himself discontented or dishonoured
for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and
jail deliveries? or because he may not as a judge sit out the
wrangling noise of litigious courts to shrive the purses of
unconfessing and unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be
discouraged though men call him not lord, whereas the due
performance of his office would gain him, even from lords and
princes, the voluntary title of father?"

When it was said of Robespierre, _cet homme ira bien loin, car il croit
tout ce qu'il dit_, it was probably meant that he would attain the chief
place in the State. It might have been said of Milton in the literal
sense. The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity
to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies. His treatise on
Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is
so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it
until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pass
on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on
education and on the freedom of the press.

Milton's tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was t