ncern in those
constitutional changes, he may have reconciled himself to them easily
enough, and also to the transmission of the Protectorship from Oliver
to Richard. The one insuperable stumbling-block, I believe, had been
and was Cromwell's Established Church. Even in his blindness he
could theorize on that, and stiffen himself more and more in his
intense Religious Voluntaryism, Conscious of his irreconcileable
dissent from Cromwell's policy in this great matter, and knowing that
Cromwell was aware of the fact, it may have been a satisfaction to
him that he was not called upon to act a Parliamentary part, in which
proclamation of the dissent and consequent rupture with Cromwell on
the ecclesiastical question would have been inevitable. It may have
been some satisfaction to him that he could go on faithfully and
honestly as a servant of Cromwell in the special business of the
Latin Secretaryship, and for the rest be a lonely thinker and take
refuge in silence. It is worth observing, indeed, that nothing of a
political kind had come from Milton's pen during the last three or
four years of Oliver's Protectorate,--nothing even indirectly bearing
on the internal politics of the Commonwealth since his _Pro Se
Defensio_ against Morus in 1655, and nothing directly bearing
thereon since his _Defensio Secunda_ of 1654. And so, if we
conclude this inquiry by saying that, at the time of Richard's
accession and the meeting of his Parliament, Milton was still a
Cromwellian, but a Cromwellian with the old Miltonic reserves, and
these strengthened of late rather than weakened, we shall be about
right. To the public, however, in the present controversy between the
Protectoratists and the pure Republicans, he was distinctly a
Protectoratist, a Cromwellian, one of the Court-party, an official of
Richard and his Council.

Since Cromwell's death, we have now to add, Milton had been
re-mustering his reserves. Under a new Protector, and from the new
Parliament of that new Protector, might he not have a hearing on
points on which he had for some time been silent? On this chance, he
had interrupted even his _Paradise Lost_, in order to prepare an
address to the new Parliament. As might be expected, it was on the
subject of the relations of Church and State. Meditating on this
subject, and how it might be best treated practically at such a time,
Milton, had concluded that it might be broken into two parts. "Two
things there be which have be