It can be shown that all of the features which make up Milton’s arduous style proceed from three or four sources. The first of these is the primacy of the concept. What this primacy signifies is that in his prose Milton wrote primarily as a thinker and not as an artificer. That is to say, his units of composition are built upon concepts and not upon conventionalized expository patterns. For him the linguistic sentence was a means, to be expanded and shaped as the driving force of the thought required. Or perhaps it would be more meaningful to say that for him the sentence was an accommodation-form. He will put into it as much or as little as he needs, and often, as we shall see presently, he needed a great deal. This use of the sentence as an accommodation-form produces what is perhaps the most obvious feature of his style, the long period. What length must a sentence have to be called “long”? Of course our usual standard is the sentence we are accustomed to, and in present-day writing that sentence will run 20-30 words, to cite an average range for serious writing. Milton’s sentences very frequently run 60-80 words, and many will exceed 100, the length of an average paragraph today.[129] To examine Milton’s method with the lengthy period, we may well begin with the second sentence of _Of Reformation in England_, an outstanding specimen of 373 words. 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 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, as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual; they began to draw down all the divine intercourse between God and the soul, yea, the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form, urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence, and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked