to speak French in their houses, in French to write their bills. and letters, as a great piece of gentility, ashamed of their own—a presage of their subjection shortly to that people whose fashions and language they affected so slavishly.1

Thus the English, while they agreed not about the choice of their native king, were constrained to take the yoke of an outlandish conqueror. With what minds and by what course of life they had fitted themselves for this servitude, William of Malmesbury spares not to lay open. Not a few years before the Normans came, the clergy, though in Edward the Confessor's days, had lost all good literature and religion, scarce able to read and understand their Latin service; he was a miracle, to others, who knew his grammar. The monks went clad in fine stuffs, and made no difference what they eat; which, though in itself no fault, yet to their consciences was irreligious. The great men, given to gluttony and dissolute life, made a prey of the common people;

the meaner sort, tippling together night and day, spent all they had in drunkenness, attended with other vices which effeminate men's minds. Whence it came to pass that, carried on with fury and rashness more than any true fortitude or skill of war, they gave to William their conqueror so easy a conquest. Not but that some few of all sorts were much better among them; but such was the generality. And, as the long-suffering of God permits bad men to enjoy prosperous days with the good, so His severity oft-times exempts not good men from their share in evil times with the bad.

If these were the causes of such misery and thraldom to those our ancestors, with what better close can be concluded than here in fit season to remember this age, in the midst of her security, to fear from like vices, without amendment, the revolution of like calamities?2

1 Ibid. 5. 375.
2 Ibid. 5. 392-3.

From Milton's Commonplace Book.

Mores Gentium

A dangerous thing, and an ominous thing, to imitate with earnestness the fashions of neighbor nations. So the English ran madding after the French in Edward Confessor's time;. . . God turn the omen from these days.1

From Paradise Lost (1667).

'Since thy original lapse, true liberty

Is lost, which always with right reason dwells
Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being.
Reason in Man obscured, or not obeyed,
Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart passions catch the government
From reason, and to servitude reduce

Man, till then free. Therefore, since he permits
Within himself unworthy powers to reign
Over free reason, God, in judgment just,
Subjects him from without to violent lords
Who oft as undeservedly enthral

His outward freedom. '2

"Thus will this latter, as the former world,
Still tend from bad to worse, till God at last,
Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw
His presence from among them, and avert
His holy eyes; resolving from thenceforth
To leave them to their own polluted ways,
And one peculiar nation to select

From all the rest, of whom to be invoked.'3

'The race elect

Safe towards Canaan, from the shore, advance
Through the wild Desert-not the readiest way;
Lest, entering on the Canaanite alarmed,

War terrify them inexpert, and fear

Return them back to Egypt, choosing rather
Inglorious life with servitude; for life

1 Commonplace Book, P. 180.

2 Paradise Lost 12. 83–95.

3 Ibid. 12. 105-12.

To noble and ignoble is more sweet

Untrained in arms, where rashness leads not on.
This also shall they gain by their delay

In the wide wilderness: there they shall found
Their government, and their great Senate choose
Through the twelve tribes, to rule by laws ordained.
God, from the Mount of Sinai, whose gray top
Shall tremble, He descending, will Himself
In thunder, lightning, and loud trumpet's sound,
Ordain them laws; part, such as appertain
To civil justice; part, religious rites

Of sacrifice, informing them, by types
And shadows, of that destined Seed to bruise
The Serpent, by what means He shall achieve
Mankind's deliverance. But the voice of God
To mortal ear is dreadful; they beseech
That Moses might report to them His will,
And terror cease; he grants what they besought,
Instructed that to God is no access

Without Mediator, whose high office now
Moses in figure bears, to introduce

One greater, of Whose day he shall foretell,
And all the Prophets, in their age, the times
Of great Messiah shall sing. Thus laws and rites
Established, such delight hath God in men
Obedient to His will, that He vouchsafes
Among them to set up His tabernacle—
The Holy One with mortal men to dwell.
By His prescript a sanctuary is framed
Of cedar, overlaid with gold; therein
An ark, and in the ark His testimony,
The records of His covenant; over these
A mercy-seat of gold, between the wings
Of two bright Cherubim; before Him burn
Seven lamps, as in a zodiac representing
The heavenly fires. Over the tent a cloud
Shall rest by day, a fiery gleam by night,
Save when they journey; and at length they come,
Conducted by His Angel, to the land
Promised to Abraham and his seed.'1

1 Ibid. 12. 214-60.

12. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, AND TRUE RELIGION

THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECT
From Of Reformation in England (1641).

Amidst those deep and retired thoughts, which, with every man Christianly instructed, ought to be most frequent of God and of His miraculous ways and works amongst men, and of our religion and works to be performed to Him—after the story of our Saviour Christ, suffering to the lowest bent of weakness in the flesh, and presently triumphing to the highest pitch of glory in the spirit, which drew up His body also; till we in both be united to Him in the revelation of His kingdom do not know of anything more worthy to take up the whole passion of pity on the one side and joy on the other than to consider, first, the foul and sudden corruption, and then, after many a tedious age, the longdeferred but much more wonderful and happy reformation, of the Church in these latter days Sad it is to think how that doctrine of the Gospel, planted by teachers divinely inspired, and by them winnowed and sifted from the chaff of overdated ceremonies, and refined to such a spiritual height and temper of purity and knowledge of the Creator that the body, with all the circumstances of time and place, were purified by the affections of the regenerate soul, and nothing left impure but sin-faith needing not the weak and fallible office of the senses to be either the ushers or interpreters of heavenly mysteries, save where our Lord Himself in His sacraments ordained-that such a doctrine should, through the grossness and blindness of her professors, and the fraud of deceivable traditions, drag so downwards as to backslide one way into the Jewish beggary of old cast-rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited paganism of sensual

idolatry, attributing purity or impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the spirit to the outward and customary eye-service of the body.1

But to dwell no longer in characterizing the depravities of the Church, and how they sprung, and how they took increase when I recall to mind, at last, after so many dark ages wherein the huge overshadowing train of Error had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of the Church, how the bright and blissful Reformation (by divine power) struck through the black and settled night of ignorance and anti-Christian tyranny, methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears, and the sweet odor of the returning Gospel imbathe his soul with the fragrancy of Heaven. Then was the sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it, the schools opened, divine and human learning raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues, the princes and cities trooping apace to the new-erected banner of salvation.2

From The Christian Doctrine.

If I were to say that I had devoted myself to the study of the Christian religion because nothing else can so effectually rescue the lives and minds of men from those two detestable curses, slavery and superstition, I should seem to have acted rather from a regard to my highest earthly comforts than from a religious motive. But since it is only to the individual faith of each that the Deity has opened the way of eternal salvation, and as He requires that he who would be saved should have a personal belief of his own, I resolved not to repose on the faith or judgment of others in matters relating to God; but, on the one hand, having taken the grounds of my faith from divine revelation alone, and on the other, having neglected nothing which

1 Prose Works 2. 364–5.

2 Ibid. 2. 366-7.