“Oh, what will men not dare, if thus they dare
  Be impudent to Heaven, and play with prayer,
  Play with that fear, with that religious awe,
  Which keeps men free, and yet is man’s great law! 
  What can they but the worst of Atheists be
  Who, while they word it ’gainst impiety,
  Affront the throne of God with their false deeds? 
  Alas! this wonder in the Atheist breeds. 
  Are these the men that would the age reform,
  That Down with Superstition cry, and swarm
  This painted glass, that sculpture, to deface,
  But worship pride and avarice in their place?
  Religion they bawl out, yet know not what
  Religion is, unless it be to prate!”

That such “a smart thing,” as Wood calls it, should have appeared in the middle of Cromwell’s Protectorate, and that, its anti-Cromwellianism being implied in its general anti-Puritanism rather than explicitly avowed, it should have had a considerable circulation, need not surprise us.  What is surprising is that the author should have been Milton’s younger nephew, who had been brought up from his very childhood under his uncle’s roof, and educated wholly and solely by his uncle’s own care.  It would add to the surprise if the thing had been actually written in Milton’s house; and even for that there is, as we shall find, something like evidence.  Altogether, I should say, Mr. John Phillips had, of late, got quite beyond his uncle’s control, and had taken to courses of his own, not in very good company.  Among new acquaintances he had forsworn his uncle’s politics, and was no longer perfectly at ease with him.[1]

[Footnote 1:  A Satyr against Hypocrites, 1655 (Thomason copy for date of publication); Godwin’s Lives of the Phillipses, 49-51; Wood’s Ath.  IV. 764.—­The Satyr against Hypocrites is ascribed in some book-catalogues to Edward Phillips; nay, I have found it ascribed, by a singular absurdity, to Milton himself.  That it passed at the time as Edward Phillips’s seems proved by the entry of it in the Stationers’ Registers under date March 14, 1654-5:  “A Satyr against Hypocrites by Edward Phillips, Gent,” the publisher’s name being given as “Nathaniel Brooke.”  I cannot explain this; but John Phillips was certainly the author.  Wood alone would be good authority; but it appears from one of Bliss’s notes to Wood that the piece was afterwards claimed by John Phillips, and in Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum, published in 1675, the piece is ascribed by name to his brother John, in evidence of his “vein of burlesque and facetious poetry” (Godwin, Lives of the Phillipses, p. 158).  It was a rather popular piece when first published, and was twice reprinted after the Restoration.]