There are many who have wished that Milton were living at this hour, but not all have taken into account the fact that his great polemical writings demand an heroic kind of attention which modern education does not discipline the majority of our citizens to give. Even in the last century W. E. Channing was moved to lament “the fastidiousness and effeminacy of modern readers” when faced with Milton’s prose writings. He went on to say, in a passage which may serve to introduce our topic, “To be universally intelligible is not the highest merit. A great mind cannot, without injurious constraint, shrink itself to the grasp of common passive readers.” It is wrong therefore to expect it to sacrifice great qualities “that the multitude may keep pace with it.”[128] The situation which gave rise to Channing’s complaint has grown measurably worse by our day, when the common passive reader determines the level of most publications. The mere pursuance of Milton’s meaning requires an enforcement of attention, and the perception of his judgments requires an active sensibility incompatible with a state of relaxation. There is nothing in Milton for the reader who must be put at ease and treated only to the quickly apprehensible. But along with this turning away from the difficult, there is another cause at work, a feeling, quite truly grounded, that Milton’s very arduousness of spirit calls for elevation on the part of the reader. Milton assumes an heroic stance, and he demands a similar stance of those who would meet him. An age which has come to suspect this as evidence of aristocratic tendency will then avoid Milton also for a moral reason, preferring, even when it agrees with him, to have the case stated in more plebeian fashion. Therefore the reading of Milton is more than a problem in communication; it is a problem also of gaining insight, or even of developing sympathy with the aristocratic intellectualism which breathes through all he wrote.