reason for believing that before the
end of the Protectorate his own Oliverianism or Cromwellianism had
become weaker than at first. The Miltonic reserves, as we have called
them, with which he had given his adhesion to the Protectorate even
at first, had taken stronger and stronger development in his mind;
and, whatever he found to admire in Cromwell's Government all in all,
the whole course of that Government in Church matters had been a
disappointment. Milton wanted to see Church and State entirely
separated; Cromwell had mixed them, intertwined them, more than ever.
Milton wanted to see the utter abolition in England of anything that
could be called a clergy; Cromwell had made it one of the chief
objects of his rule to maintain a clergy and extend it massively.
Whether this policy might not yet be reversed had been one of
Milton's first questions with himself after Cromwell's death; and his
_Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes_, addressed to
Richard's Parliament, had been a challenge to that Parliament not to
shrink from the great attempt. In that treatise, it is not too much
to say, Milton had shaken hands again with the old Republican party.
In the preface to it he had dwelt fondly on his former connexion with
them, on his recollection especially of the speeches he had heard
from some of them in the old Councils of State of the Commonwealth,
when he had first the honour to sit there as Latin Secretary, and
listen to their private debates. What clearness then, what
decisiveness, in such men as Vane and Bradshaw, on that "important
article of Christianity," the necessary distinctness of the Civil
from the Religious! Ah! could those old days be back! He had written
as if those days had not been satisfactory, as if the dispersion of
his old masters of those days had been necessary; but, in so writing,
had he not been too hasty? So he had been asking himself of late; and
though, as Richard's Latin Secretary, and writing under his
Protectorate, he had not said a word against the established
Protectoral Government, he had expressed generally his conviction
that England would never be right till either those charged with the
Government should be men "discerning between Civil and Religious" or
none but such should be charged with the Government. Now, however, in
May 1659, he might speak more plainly. Richard's Government had been
swept away;--Richard's Parliament, which he had addressed, was no
more in being;