After intimating that this was but the first of two tracts and that the other would follow, and also that his argument is to be wholly and exclusively from Scripture, Milton propounds the argument itself under four successive heads or propositions.—­The first is that, there being, by the fundamental principle of Protestantism, “no other divine rule or authority from without us, warrantable to one another as a common ground, but the Holy Scripture, and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit so interpreting that Scripture as warrantable only to ourselves and to such whose consciences we can so persuade,” it follows that “no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own.”  Having reasoned this at some length by quotations of Scripture texts and explanations of the same, he proceeds to “yet another reason why it is unlawful for the civil magistrate to use force in matters of Religion:  which is, because to judge in those things, though we should grant him able, which is proved he is not, yet as a civil magistrate he hath no right.”  Under this second head, and also by means of Scripture quotations, there is an exposition of Milton’s favourite idea of the purely spiritual nature of Christ’s kingdom and of the instrumentalities it permits.  The third proposition advances the argument by maintaining that not only is the civil magistrate unable, from the nature of the case, to determine in matters of Religion, and not only has he no right to try, but he also does positive wrong by trying.  In arguing this, still Scripturally, Milton dilates on the meaning of the “Christian liberty” of the true believer, with the heights and depths which it implies in the renewed spirit, the superiority to “the bondage of ceremonies” and “the weak and beggarly rudiments.”  The fourth and last reason pleaded, still from Scripture, against the compulsion of the magistrate in Religion, is that he must fail signally in the very ends he proposes to himself; “and those hardly can be other than first the glory of God, next either the spiritual good of them whom he forces or the temporal punishment of their scandal to others.”  Far from attaining either of these ends, he can but dishonour God and promote profanity and hypocrisy.—­“On these four Scriptural reasons as on a firm square.” says Milton at the close, “this truth, the right of Christian and Evangelic Liberty, will stand immoveable against all those pretended consequences of license and confusion which, for the most part, men most licentious and confused themselves, or such as whose severity would be wiser than divine wisdom, are ever aptest to object against the ways of God.”

Such is the plan of the little treatise, the literary texture of which is plain and homely, rather than rich, learned, or rhetorical.  “Pomp and ostentation of reading,” he expressly says, “is admired among the vulgar; but doubtless in matters of Religion he is learnedest who is plainest.”  It was, we may remember, his first considerable English dictation for the press since his blindness, and what one chiefly notices in the style is the strong grasp he still retains of his old characteristic syntax.[1] The following are a few of the more interesting individual passages or expressions:—­