clog, and to provide for his own peace and contentment in a fitter match? Woe is me! to what a pass is the world conic that a Christian, pretending to Information, should dare to tender so loose a project to the public! I must seriously profess that, when I first did cast my eyes upon the front of the book, I supposed some great wit meant to try his skill in the maintenance of this so wild and improbable a paradox; but, ere I could run over some of those too well-penned pages, I found the author was in earnest, and meant seriously to contribute this piece of good counsel, in way of reformation, to the wise and seasonable care of superiors. I cannot but blush for our age wherein so bold a motion hath been, amongst others, admitted to the light. What will all the Christian Churches through the world, to whose notice these lines shall come, think of our woeful degeneration, &c."? [Footnote: Hall's Works (edit. 1837), VII. 467.] Hall, it will be seen, had noted the literary ability of the pamphlet, while amazed by its doctrine. Neither Howell's nor Bishop Hall's opinion can have reached the author of the pamphlet till long after the date now in view. But other opinions to the same effect had been reaching him. Especially, it seems, the pamphlet had caused a fluttering among the London clergy. The consequence had best be told by himself. "God, it seems, intended to prove me, whether I durst alone take up a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, and found I durst. My name I did not publish, as not willing it should sway the reader either for me or against me. But, when I was told that the style (which what it ails to be so soon distinguishable I cannot tell) was known by most men, and that some of the clergy began to inveigh and exclaim on what I was credibly informed they had not read, I look it then for my proper season both to show a name that could easily contemn such an indiscreet kind of censure, and to reinforce the question with a more accurate diligence, that, if any of them would be so good as to leave railing, and to let us hear so much of his learning and Christian wisdom as will be strictly demanded of him in his answering to this problem, care was had he should not spend his preparations against a nameless pamphlet." [Footnote: This passage, fitting in here with chronological exactness, occurs in Milton's _Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce_, published in July 1644.] In other words, he resolved to abandon the anonymous. His pamphlet, easily traced to him from the first by its Miltonic style, had been sold out, or nearly so; people generally, but clergymen especially, were saying harsh things about it, and about him as its author; but some of these critics, he authentically knew, had never read the pamphlet, and others were making a point of the fact that it had appeared without its author's name. Well, there should be an end of that! He would put forth a second edition of the pamphlet, and avow the