The Life of John Milton Volume 3 1643-1649: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His TimeMasson, David
Religion
The Life of John Milton Volume 3 1643-1649: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time
Masson, David
Milton, John, 1608-1674; Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography
And so Truth and Peace hold their long discourse, evolving very much that
doctrine of the absolute Liberty of Conscience, as derivable from, or
radically identical with, the idea of the utter distinctness of the
Church of Christ from the world or civil society, which had been
propounded first by the Brownists and Baptists, and had come down as a
tradition from them. But it is evolved by Williams more boldly and
passionately than by any before him. There is a fine union throughout of
warmth of personal Christian feeling with intellectual resoluteness in
accepting every possible consequence of his main principle. Here are a
few phrases from the marginal summaries which give the substance of the
Dialogue, page after page:--"The Church and civil State confusedly made
all one"; "The civil magistrates bound to preserve the bodies of their
subjects, and not to destroy them for conscience sake"; "The civil sword
may make a nation of hypocrites and anti-Christians, but not one
Christian"; "Evil is always evil, yet permission of it may in case be
good"; "Christ Jesus the deepest politician that ever was, and yet he
commands a toleration of anti-Christians"; "Seducing teachers, either
Pagan, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian, may yet be obedient subjects
to the civil laws"; "Christ's lilies may flourish in his Church,
notwithstanding the abundance of weeds in the world permitted"; "The
absolute sufficiency of the sword of the Spirit"; "A National Church not
instituted by Christ Jesus"; "The civil commonweal and the spiritual
commonweal, the Church, not inconsistent, though independent the one on
the other"; "Forcing of men to godliness or God's worship the greatest
cause of breach of civil peace"; "Master of a family under the Gospel not
charged to force all under him from their consciences to his"; "Few
magistrates, few men, spiritually and Christianly good: yet divers sorts
of goodness, natural, artificial, civil, &c."; "Persons may with less sin
be forced to marry whom they cannot love than to worship where they
cannot believe"; "Christ Jesus never appointed a maintenance of ministers
from the unconverted and unbelieving: [but] they that compel men to hear
compel men also to pay for their hearing and conversion"; "The civil
power owes _three_ things to the true Church of Christ--(l)
Approbation, (2) Submission [i.e. interpreted in the text to be personal
submission of the civil magistrate to church-membership, if he himself
believes], (3) Protection"; "The civil magistrate owes _two_ things
to false worshippers--(1) Permission, (2) Protection."--Whoever has read
this string of phrases possesses the marrow of Williams's treatise. At
the end of it there is an interesting discussion of the question whether
only church-members, or "godly persons in a particular church-estate,"
ought to be eligible to be magistrates. To Williams, who was a pure
democrat in politics, and was founding the new State of Rhode Island on
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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