old
Commonwealth's men, of the kind that would have carried the abolition
of Tithes and of a State-Church in the Barebones Parliament of 1653,
had not Rous broken up that Parliament and resurrendered the power
to Cromwell, and (2) on the special fact that some of them were men
whom Milton had himself heard with admiration, in the Councils of
State of the Commonwealth, when he first sat there as Foreign
Secretary in attendance, avowing and expounding the principle of
Voluntaryism in Religion, in its fullest possible extent. Among these
last Milton must have had in view chiefly such members of the Commons
House in Richard's Parliament as Vane, Bradshaw, Harrison, Neville,
Ludlow, and Scott, all of whom had been members of one, or several,
or all, of the Councils of State of the old Commonwealth; but he may
have had in view also such members of the present Upper House as
Fleetwood, St. John, and Viscount Lisle. Above all, Vane must have
been in his mind,--Vane, on whom half of his eulogy in 1652 had
been.

"To know
Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,
What severs each, _thou_, hast learned; which few have done.
The bounds of either sword to _thee_ we owe."

Might not Vane and his fellows move in the present Parliament for a
reconsideration of that part of the policy of the Protectorate which
concerned Religion? Might they not induce the Parliament to revert,
in the matters of Tithes, a State Ministry, and Endowments of
Religion, to the temper and determinations of the much-abused, but
really wise and deep-minded, Barebones Parliament? Nothing less than
this is the ultimate purport of Milton's appeal; and little wonder
that he prefixed an intimation that he wrote now only as a private
man, and without any official authority whatever. "Of Civil Liberty,"
he says in the conclusion of his preface, "I have written heretofore
by the appointment, and not without the approbation, of Civil Power:
of Christian Liberty I write now,--which others long since having
done with all freedom under Heathen Emperors, I should do wrong to
suspect that now I shall with less under Christian Governors, and
such especially as profess openly their defence of Christian liberty,
although I write this not otherwise appointed and induced than by an
inward persuasion of the Christian duty which I may usefully
discharge herein to the common Lord and Master of us all." The words
imply just a shade of doubt whether he, a salarie