own heads. Go therefore and use all your art, apply your sledges, your levers, and your iron crows to heave and hale your mighty Polypheme of Antiquity, to the delusion of novices and inexperienced Christians. We shall adhere close to the Scriptures of God, which he hath left us as the just and adequate measure of truth, fitted and proportioned to the diligent study, memory, and use of every faithful man, whose every part consorting and making up the harmonious symmetry of complete instruction, is able to set out to us a perfect man of God, or bishop, thoroughly furnished to all the good works of his charge; and with this weapon, without stepping a foot further, we shall not doubt to batter and throw down your Nebuchadnezzar's image, and crumble it like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, as well the gold of those Apostolic Successors that you boast of as your Constantinian silver, together with the iron, the brass, and the clay of those muddy and strawy ages that follow. He gives his opinion as follows on the subject of Ordination : As for ordination, what is it but the laying on of hands, an outward sign or symbol of admission? It creates nothing, it confers nothing. It is the inward calling of God that makes a minister, and his own painful study and diligence that manures and improves his ministerial gifts. In the primitive times many, before ever they had received ordination from the Apostles, had done the Church noble service, as Apollos and others. It is but an orderly form of receiving a man already fitted, and committing to him a particular charge. The employment of preaching is as holy and far more excellent; the care also and judgement to be used in the winning of souls-which is thought to be sufficient in every worthy minister-is an ability above that is required in ordination; for many may be able to judge who is fit to be made a minister that would not be found fit to be made ministers themselves; as it will not be denied that he may be competent judge of a neat picture or elegant poem that cannot limn the like. Why, therefore, we should constitute a superior order in the Church to perform an office which is not only every minister's function, but inferior also to that which he has a confessed right to, and why this superiority should remain thus usurped, some wise Epimenides tell us. After some severe remarks on episcopal jurisdiction, he gives the following apologue or law-case, as he terms it. A certain man of large possessions had a fair garden, and kept therein an honest and laborious servant, whose skill and profession was to set or sow all wholesome herbs and delightful flowers, according to every season, and whatever else was to be done in a wellhusbanded nursery of plants and fruits. Now, when the time was come that he should cut his hedges, prune his trees, look to his tender slips, and pluck up the weeds that hindered their growth, he gets him up by break of day, and makes account to do what was needful in his garden: and who would think that any other should know better than he how the day's work was to be spent? Yet, for all this there comes another strange gardener, that never knew the soil, never handled a dibble or spade to set the least potherb that grew there, much less had endured an hour's sweat or chillness, and yet challenges as his right the binding or unbinding of every flower, the clipping of every bush, the weeding and worming of every bed, both in that and all other gardens thereabout. The honest gardener, that ever since the daypeep till now the sun was grown somewhat rank, had wrought painfully about his banks and seedplots, at his commanding voice turns suddenly about with some wonder; and although he could have well beteemed to have thanked him for the ease he proffered, yet, loving his own handiwork, modestly refused him, telling him withal, that for his part, if he had thought much of his own pains, he could for once have committed the work to one of his fellow-labourers, for as much as it is well known to be a matter of less skill and less labour to keep a garden handsome than it is to plant it or contrive it; and that he had already performed himself. "No," said the stranger, "this is neither for you nor your fellows to meddle with, but for me only, that am for this purpose in dignity far above you; and the provision which the lord of the soil allows me in this office is, and that with good reason, tenfold your wages." The gardener smiled and *This word seems to be used here, as in That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly, (Hamlet, i. 2,) in the sense of permit, allow. In A. S. týman is to vouch, warrant, witness. shook his head; but what was determined, I cannot tell you till the end of this Parliament.* APOLOGY FOR SMECTYMNUUS. As his opponent had made a most virulent and unjustifiable attack on his private character, Milton, after having at great length explained his motives for entering on this controversy and vindicated his conduct in it, proceeds to give the following interesting particulars respecting his life and pursuits. I must be thought, if this libeller-for now he shows himself to be so-can find belief, after an inordinate and riotous youth spent at the University, to have been at length "vomited out thence." For which commodious lie, that he may be encouraged in the trade another time, I thank him; for it hath given me an apt occasion to acknowledge publicly, with all grateful mind, the more than ordinary favour and respect which I found, above any of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting, after I had taken two degrees as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay, as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection toward me which being likewise propense to all such as were for their studious and civil life worthy of esteem, I could not wrong their judgements and upright intentions so much as to think I had that regard from them for other cause than that I might be still encouraged to proceed in the honest and laudable courses, of which they apprehended I had given good proof. And to those ingenuous and friendly men, who were ever the countenancers of virtuous and * That is, whether episcopacy would be retained or abolished. For our own parts, though we acknowledge that the bishop and the presbyter were originally the same, and that the offices did not separate perhaps till the second century, yet we approve of episcopacy as a distinct order, and would willingly see the whole patronage of the Church, under proper restrictions, in the hands of the prelates, and themselves really elective. hopeful wits, I wish the best and happiest things that friends in absence wish one to another. As for the common [general] approbation or dislike of that place, as now it is, that I should esteem or disesteem myself or any other the more for that, too simple and too credulous is the confuter, if he think to obtain with me or any right discerner. Of small practice were that physician who could not judge, by what she or her sister hath of long time vomited, that the worser stuff she strongly keeps in her stomach, but the better she is ever kecking at, and is queasy. She vomits now out of sickness, but ere it will be well with her she must vomit by strong physic. In the meantime that suburb-sink, as this rude scavenger calls it, and more than scurrilously taunts it with the plague, having a worse plague in his middle entrail,--that suburb wherein I dwell shall be in my account a more honourable place than his University; which, as in the time of her better health and my younger judgement, I never greatly admired, so now much less. But he follows me to the city, still usurping and forging beyond his book-notice, which only he affirms to have had, "and where my morning-haunts are he wisses not." It is wonder that, being so rare an alchymist of slander, he could not extract that as well as the university-vomit and the suburb-sink, which his art could distill so cunningly. But, because his lembic fails him, to give him and envy the more vexation, I will tell him. Those morning-haunts are, where they should be, at home, not sleeping or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring; in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour or to devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier; to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary or memory have its full fraught then with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to religion, and our country's liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations rather than see the ruin of our protestation and the enforcement of a slavish life. : These are the morning-practices; proceed now to the afternoon. "In playhouses," he says, "and the bordelloes." Your intelligence? unfaithful spy of Canaan. He gives in his evidence that "there he hath traced me." Take him at his word, readers. But, let him bring good sureties, ere ye dismiss him, that while he pretended to dog others, he did not turn in for his own pleasure; for so much in effect he concludes against himself, not contented to be caught in every other gin, but he must be such a novice as to be still hampered in his own hemp. In the Animadversions, saith he, I find the mention of old cloaks, false beards, night-walkers, and salt lotion; therefore the Animadvertor haunts playhouses and bordelloes; for if he did not, how could he speak of such gear? Now, that he may know what it is to be a child and yet to meddle with edged tools, I turn his antistrophon upon his own head. The Confuter knows that these things are the furniture of playhouses and bordelloes, therefore, by the same reason, “the Confuter himself has been traced in these places." Was it such a dissolute speech, telling of some politicians, who were wont to eavesdrop in disguises,-to say they were often liable to a nightwalking cudgeller or the emptying of a urinal? What if I had written, as your friend, the author of the aforesaid Mime, Mundus Alter et Idem,* to have been ravished like some young Cephalus or Hylas, by a troop of camping housewives in Viraginea, and that he was there forced to swear himself an uxorious varlet; then after a long servitude to have come into Aphrodisia, that pleasant country, that gave such a sweet smell to his nostrils, among the shameless courtesans of Desvergonia? Surely, he would then have concluded me as constant at the bordello as the galley-slave at his oar. But since there is such necessity to the hearsay of a tire,† a periwig, or a vizard, that plays must have been seen, what difficulty was there in that? When in the colleges so many of the young divines, and those in next aptitude to divinity,‡ have been seen so often upon the stage, writhing and unboning their clergylimbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were wellnigh having, to the eyes of courtiers and court-ladies, with their grooms and mademoiselles.§ There, *Bishop Hall, the father of Milton's opponent. + Hearsay is the hearing of, knowing about; tire is a head-dress. Divinity-students. § That is, as we should now say, "with their own men and their lady's-maids." It was the custom to go thus attended. We may see |