inister and his pretended necessary hallowing, more than
any other act, enterprise, or contract, of civil life,--which ought
all to be done also in the Lord and to his glory,--all which, no
less than marriage, were by the cunning of priests heretofore, as
material to their profit, transacted at the altar. Our Divines deny
it to be a Sacrament; yet retained the celebration, till prudently
a late Parliament recovered the civil liberty of marriage from
their encroachment, and transferred the ratifying and registering
thereof from their Canonical Shop to the proper cognisance of Civil
Magistrates" [The Marriages Act of the Barebones Parliament; in
accordance with which had been Milton's own second marriage: see
ante p. 281, and Vol. IV. p. 511].

_Sitting under a Stated Minister:_--"If men be not all their
lifetime under a teacher to learn Logic, Natural Philosophy,
Ethics, or Mathematics, ... certainly it is not necessary to the
attainment of Christian knowledge that men should sit all their
life long at the foot of a pulpited divine, while he, a lollard
indeed over his elbow-cushion, in almost the seventh part of forty
or fifty years, teaches them scarce half the principles of
Religion, and his sheep ofttimes sit the while to as little purpose
of benefiting as the sheep in their pews at Smithfield."

_Congregations for mutual Edification:_--"Notwithstanding the
gaudy superstition of some devoted still ignorantly to temples, we
may be well assured that He who disdained not to be laid in a
manger disdains not to be preached in a barn, and that by such
meetings as these, being indeed most apostolical and primitive,
they will in a short time advance more in Christian knowledge and
reformation of life than by the many years preaching of such an
incumbent,--I may say such an incubus ofttimes,--as will be meanly
hired to abide long in those places."

_A Reflection on Cromwell for his Established Church:_--"For
the magistrate, in person of a nursing father, to make the Church
his mere ward, as always in minority,-the Church to whom he ought
as a Magistrate (Isaiah XLIS. 23) '_to bow down with his face
toward the earth and lick up the dust of her feet,_'--her to
subject to his political drifts and conceived opinions by mastering
her revenue, and so by his examinant Committees to circumscribe her
free election of ministers,--is neither just nor pious: no h