and affection hath confined and dedicated first to my own nation, and in a season wherein the timely reading thereof, to the easier accomplishment of your great work, may save you much labour and interruption.”  Then, after having stated the main doctrine, he continues:—­“One advantage I make no doubt of, that I shall write to many eminent persons of your number already perfect and resolved in this important article of Christianity:  some of whom I remember to have heard often, for several years, at a Council next in authority to your own, so well joining religion with civil prudence, and yet so well distinguishing the different power of either, and this not only voting but frequently reasoning why it should be so, that, if any there present had been before of an opinion contrary, he might doubtless have departed thence a convert in that point, and have confessed that then both Commonwealth and Religion will at length, if ever, flourish, in Christendom, when either they who govern discern between Civil and Religious, or they only who so discern shall be admitted to govern.”  In other words, Milton’s hopes of a favourable hearing for his doctrine in Richard’s Parliament were founded (1) on the general ground that many members of the Parliament were old Commonwealth’s men, of the kind that would have carried the abolition of Tithes and of a State-Church in the Barebones Parliament of 1653, had not Rous broken up that Parliament and resurrendered the power to Cromwell, and (2) on the special fact that some of them were men whom Milton had himself heard with admiration, in the Councils of State of the Commonwealth, when he first sat there as Foreign Secretary in attendance, avowing and expounding the principle of Voluntaryism in Religion, in its fullest possible extent.  Among these last Milton must have had in view chiefly such members of the Commons House in Richard’s Parliament as Vane, Bradshaw, Harrison, Neville, Ludlow, and Scott, all of whom had been members of one, or several, or all, of the Councils of State of the old Commonwealth; but he may have had in view also such members of the present Upper House as Fleetwood, St. John, and Viscount Lisle.  Above all, Vane must have been in his mind,—­Vane, on whom half of his eulogy in 1652 had been.

      “To know
  Both spiritual power and civil, what each means,
  What severs each, thou, hast learned; which few have done. 
  The bounds of either sword to thee we owe.”

Might not Vane and his fellows move in the present Parliament for a reconsideration of that part of the policy of the Protectorate which concerned Religion?  Might they not induce the Parliament to revert, in the matters of Tithes, a State Ministry, and Endowments of Religion, to the temper and determinations of the much-abused, but really wise and deep-minded, Barebones Parliament?  Nothing less than this is the ultimate purport of Milton’s appeal; and little wonder that he prefixed an intimation that he wrote now only