e three courses was to be taken.
To adopt either of the two first was to subvert the Commonwealth. To
re-admit the secluded members into the present House was to convert
it into a House with an overwhelming Presbyterian majority, and to
bring back the days of Presbyterian ascendancy, with the prospect of
a restoration of Royalty on merely Presbyterian terms. To summon what
was called a new full and free Parliament was, all but certainly, to
bring back Royalty by a more hurried process still. Only by the third
method, the Rump's own method, did there seem a chance of preserving
the Republican constitution; and yet Monk's assent to it had been but
hesitating and uncertain. More ominous still had been his few words
intimating his wishes in the matter of ecclesiastical policy. He
could conceive nothing so good, on the whole, as the Scottish
Presbyterianism he had been living amidst for the last few years, and
he thought that the 'sober interest' in England, steering between the
'Cavalier party' on the one side and the 'Fanatic party' on the
other, would be most secure by keeping to a moderate Presbytery in
the State-Church. That Milton's views as to the merits of Scottish
Presbytery were not Monk's is an old story, needing no repetition
here. What must have concerned him was to see Monk not only at one
with the great mass of his countrymen on the subject of a
Church-Establishment, but actually retrograde on the question of the
desirable nature of such an Establishment, inasmuch as he seemed to
signal his countrymen back out of Cromwell's broad Church of mixed
Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, into a Church more
strictly on the Presbyterian model. Then another unpleasant novelty
in Monk's case was his fondness for the phrases _Fanatics, Fanatic
Notions_, the _Fanatic Party_. The phrases were not new; but
Monk had sent them out of Scotland before him, and had brought them
himself out of Scotland, with a new significance. Very probably they
had been supplied to him out of the vocabulary of his Scottish
clerical adviser Mr. James Sharp, or of the Scottish Resolutioner
clergy generally. At all events, it is from and after the date of
Monk's march into England that one finds the name _Fanatics_ a
common one for all those Commonwealth's men collectively who opposed
a State-Church or the moderate Presbyterian or semi-Presbyterian form
of it. Had Monk drawn out a list of his 'Fanatics,' he would have had
to put Milton himse