First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumored to be marching up, even to her walls and suburb trenches; that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues first a singular good will, contentedness, and confidence in your prudent foresight, and safe government, lords and commons; and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well grounded contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as was his who, when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate, whereupon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.[136] Milton’s concept of church government according to Scripture is thus presented in _The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty_: Did God take such delight in measuring out the pillars, arches, and doors of a material temple? Was he so punctual and circumspect in lavers, altars and sacrifices soon after to be abrogated, lest any of these should have been made contrary to his mind? Is not a far more perfect work, more agreeable to his perfections, in the most perfect state of the church militant, the new alliance to God to man? Should not he rather now by his own prescribed discipline have cast his line and level upon the soul of man, which is his rational temple, and, by the divine square and compass thereof, form and regenerate in us the lovely shapes of virtues and graces, the sooner to edify and accomplish that immortal stature of Christ’s body, which is his church, in all her glorious lineaments and proportions?[137] What we are especially called upon to note in these examples is the boldness of figuration, by which the concept survives the pressure of many, and sometimes rather concrete, tests of correspondence, as the analogy enlarges. The author’s faith in the figure as an organizing principle is likely evidence that he sees the world as form, the more of which can be drawn out the better. To a later day, any figure carried beyond modest length runs the danger of turning into an ironic commentary upon its analogue, but to Milton, as to the seventeenth century generally, it was a window to look through. Now quite literally the conceit is a concept, and we have found it to be another organizing medium of this intellectual prose, and a second proof that some texture of thought precedes the mere linguistic expression, and holds itself superior to it.