Milton at once attacks that which, to Laud, was part of "the beauty of Holiness," Jewish and Catholic survivals of "fantastic dresses, palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe". "The piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies" the Church styled "decency"; Henry VIII "stuck where he did". Under Edward VI, if his sister Mary were not to be persecuted most righteously, who were the slaves that interfered to secure for her liberty of conscience? Who but Bishops! Bishops were therefore "followers of this world," they always were and always will be. You reply that they, Cranmer and Latimer, were also martyrs? Well, says Milton, "What then?" A man may "give his body to the burning and yet not have charity". The Bishops had not charity, clearly, or they would have aided in depriving the Princess of freedom of conscience. Elizabeth, aided by Bishops, persecuted Puritans, but then Puritans _have_ a right to freedom of conscience, for themselves, and a right to prevent other people from exercising the same privilege. If there are to be Bishops they must be of popular election, but when preachers with powers in some respects greater were elected by the people in Scotland, Milton did not approve of them either. His next important tract, The Apology for Smectymnuus (five preachers, Marshal, Calamy, Young, Newcomen and Spurstow, who had attacked Episcopacy), is of 1642. Bishop Hall, who, in youth, had boasted that he was the first English satirist, had replied to the Five in his Defence of the Remonstrance; Milton had answered; Hall in his turn published "A Modest Confutation," and Milton's Apology for Smectymnuus ensued. The adversary had made scurrilous remarks, had attacked Milton's manners and morals, quite causelessly, in the controversial fashion of the age. Milton replied that his adversary was a "rude scavenger," and then gave that account of his own way of life in youth which lends its value to this passage in the discussion. He had never haunted "bordelloes," houses of ill-fame; he calls the women who keep them "prelatesses". A Bishop, to Milton, is a male of the same species. As for the theatre he had seen his fellow-students act at college, "prostituting the shame of that ministry, which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies...." He had always, he declares, been a remarkably pure young man; hence his life-long love of romances of chivalry, where every knight is bound by oath to defend, with his life if need be, the chastity of ladies. "The first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul," he says nobly. We need not dwell on his "Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," written, it seems, a few weeks after his hapless marriage in 1643. If all men were Miltons and all women worthy of them, his doctrine of freedom of divorce would not have thorny consequences.