s it been any diminution of my
regard for you (of this I would have you fully persuaded) that has
been the impediment, but only my employments or domestic cares; or
perhaps it is mere sluggishness to the act of writing that makes me
guilty of the intermitted duty. As you desire to be informed, I am,
by God's mercy, as well as usual. Of any such work as compiling the
history of our political troubles, which you seem to advise, I have
no thought whatever [_longe absum_]: they are worthier of
silence than of commemoration. What is needed is not one to compile
a good history of our troubles, but one who can happily end the
troubles themselves; for, with you, I fear lest, amid these our
civil discords, or rather sheer madnesses, we shall seem to the
lately confederated enemies of Liberty and Religion a too fit
object of attack, though in truth they have not yet inflicted a
severer wound on Religion than we ourselves have been long doing by
our crimes. But God, as I hope, on His own account, and for His
own glory, now in question, will not allow the counsels and onsets
of the enemy to succeed as they themselves wish, whatever
convulsions Kings and Cardinals meditate and design. Meanwhile, for
the Protestant Synod of Loudun, which you tell me is so soon to
meet [Milton does not seem to know that it had been sitting already
for six weeks] I pray--what has never happened to any Synod yet--a
happy issue, not of the Nazianzenian sort,[1] and am of opinion
that the issue of this one will be happy enough if, should they
decree nothing else, they should decree the expulsion of Morus. Of
my posthumous adversary, as soon as he makes his appearance, be
good enough to give me the earliest information. Farewell.

"Westminster: December 20, 1659."

[Footnote 1: The allusion seems to be to the great OEcumenical
Council of Constantinople in 381, which confirmed Gregory Nazianzen
in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and in which Gregory presided
for some time and inefficiently.]

TO THE NOBLE YOUTH, RICHARD JONES.

"For the long break in your correspondence with me your excuses are
truly most modest, inasmuch as you might with more justice accuse
me of the same fault; and, as the case stands, I am really at a
loss to know whether I should have preferred your not having been
in fault to your having apologised so finely. On no account let it
ever come into your mind that