The "Treatise on Christian Doctrine" is by far the most remarkable of all Milton's later prose publications, and would have exerted a great influence on opinion if it had appeared when the author designed. Milton's name would have been a tower of strength to the liberal eighteenth-century clergy inside and outside the Establishment. It should indeed have been sufficiently manifest that "Paradise Lost" could not have been written by a Trinitarian or a Calvinist; but theological partisanship is even slower than secular partisanship to see what it does not choose to see; and Milton's Arianism was not generally admitted until it was here avouched under his own hand. The general principle of the book is undoubting reliance on the authority of Scripture, with which such an acquaintance is manifested as could only have been gained by years of intense study. It is true that the doctrine of the inward light as the interpreter of Scripture is asserted with equal conviction; but practically this illumination seems seldom to have guided Milton to any sense but the most obvious. Hence, with the intrepid consistency that belongs to him, he is not only an Arian, but a tolerator of polygamy, finding that practice nowhere condemned in Scripture, but even recommended by respectable examples; an Anthropomorphist, who takes the ascription of human passion to the Deity in the sense certainly intended by those who made it; a believer in the materiality and natural mortality of the soul, and in the suspension of consciousness between death and the resurrection. Where less fettered by the literal Word he thinks boldly; unable to conceive creation out of nothing, he regards all existence as an emanation from the Deity, thus entitling himself to the designation of Pantheist. He reiterates his doctrine of divorce; and is as strong an Anti-Sabbatarian as Luther himself. On the Atonement and Original Sin, however, he is entirely Evangelical; and he commends public worship so long as it is not made a substitute for spiritual religion. Liturgies are evil, and tithes abominable. His exposition of social duty tempers Puritan strictness with Cavalier high-breeding, and the urbanity of a man of the world. Of his motives for publication and method of composition he says:-- "It is with a friendly and benignant feeling towards mankind that I give as wide a circulation as possible to what I esteem my best and richest possession.... And whereas the greater part of those who have written most largely on these subjects have been wont to fill whole pages with explanations of their own opinions, thrusting into the margin the texts in support of their doctrines, I have chosen, on the contrary, to fill my pages even to redundance with quotations from Scripture, so that as little space as possible might be left for my own words, even when they arise from the context of revelation itself."