en ever found working much mischief to
the Church of God and the advancement of Faith,--Force on the one
side restraining, and Hire on the other side corrupting, the Teachers
thereof." He would, therefore, write one tract on the effects of
Compulsion or State-restraint in matters of Religion and Speculation,
and another on the effects of Hire or State-endowments in the same.
The two would be interconnected, and would in fact melt into each
other; but they might appear separately, and it might be well to
begin with the first, as the least irritating. Accordingly, before
the meeting of the Parliament he had prepared, and after it had met
there was published, in the form of a very tiny octavo, a tract with
this title-page: "_A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical
Causes: Shewing that it is not lawfull for any power on Earth to
compell in matters of Religion. The author J.M. London, Printed by
Tho. Newcomb, Anno_ 1659." The tract consists of an address "To
the Parlament of the Commonwealth of England with the Dominions
thereof," occupying ten of the small pages, and signed "John Milton"
in full, and then of eighty-three pages of text.[1]

[Footnote 1: The little book was duly registered at Stationers' Hall,
under date Feb. 16, 1658-9, thus: "Mr. Tho. Newcomb entered for his
copy (under the hand of Mr. Pulleyn, warden) a book called A
Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes by John Milton."]

After intimating that this was but the first of two tracts and that
the other would follow, and also that his argument is to be wholly
and exclusively from Scripture, Milton propounds the argument itself
under four successive heads or propositions.--The first is that,
there being, by the fundamental principle of Protestantism, "no other
divine rule or authority from without us, warrantable to one another
as a common ground, but the Holy Scripture, and no other within us
but the illumination of the Holy Spirit so interpreting that
Scripture as warrantable only to ourselves and to such whose
consciences we can so persuade," it follows that "no man or body of
men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in
matters of religion to any other men's consciences but their own."
Having reasoned this at some length by quotations of Scripture texts
and explanations of the same, he proceeds to "yet another reason why
it is unlawful for the civil magistrate to use force in matters of
Religion: which is, because to ju