the liberal
eighteenth-century clergy inside and outside the Establishment. It
should indeed have been sufficiently manifest that "Paradise Lost" could
not have been written by a Trinitarian or a Calvinist; but theological
partisanship is even slower than secular partisanship to see what it
does not choose to see; and Milton's Arianism was not generally admitted
until it was here avouched under his own hand. The general principle of
the book is undoubting reliance on the authority of Scripture, with
which such an acquaintance is manifested as could only have been gained
by years of intense study. It is true that the doctrine of the inward
light as the interpreter of Scripture is asserted with equal conviction;
but practically this illumination seems seldom to have guided Milton to
any sense but the most obvious. Hence, with the intrepid consistency
that belongs to him, he is not only an Arian, but a tolerator of
polygamy, finding that practice nowhere condemned in Scripture, but even
recommended by respectable examples; an Anthropomorphist, who takes the
ascription of human passion to the Deity in the sense certainly intended
by those who made it; a believer in the materiality and natural
mortality of the soul, and in the suspension of consciousness between
death and the resurrection. Where less fettered by the literal Word he
thinks boldly; unable to conceive creation out of nothing, he regards
all existence as an emanation from the Deity, thus entitling himself to
the designation of Pantheist. He reiterates his doctrine of divorce; and
is as strong an Anti-Sabbatarian as Luther himself. On the Atonement and
Original Sin, however, he is entirely Evangelical; and he commends
public worship so long as it is not made a substitute for spiritual
religion. Liturgies are evil, and tithes abominable. His exposition of
social duty tempers Puritan strictness with Cavalier high-breeding, and
the urbanity of a man of the world. Of his motives for publication and
method of composition he says:--

"It is with a friendly and benignant feeling towards mankind that
I give as wide a circulation as possible to what I esteem my best
and richest possession.... And whereas the greater part of those
who have written most largely on these subjects have been wont to
fill whole pages with explanations of their own opinions,
thrusting into the margin the texts in support of their doctrines,
I have chose