of the old Republicans as Vane, Bradshaw, and Overton.  It had probably all along been a question with him whether the blame of their disablement under the Protectorate lay more with themselves or with Oliver.  Then, as we have abundantly seen, there is reason for believing that before the end of the Protectorate his own Oliverianism or Cromwellianism had become weaker than at first.  The Miltonic reserves, as we have called them, with which he had given his adhesion to the Protectorate even at first, had taken stronger and stronger development in his mind; and, whatever he found to admire in Cromwell’s Government all in all, the whole course of that Government in Church matters had been a disappointment.  Milton wanted to see Church and State entirely separated; Cromwell had mixed them, intertwined them, more than ever.  Milton wanted to see the utter abolition in England of anything that could be called a clergy; Cromwell had made it one of the chief objects of his rule to maintain a clergy and extend it massively.  Whether this policy might not yet be reversed had been one of Milton’s first questions with himself after Cromwell’s death; and his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, addressed to Richard’s Parliament, had been a challenge to that Parliament not to shrink from the great attempt.  In that treatise, it is not too much to say, Milton had shaken hands again with the old Republican party.  In the preface to it he had dwelt fondly on his former connexion with them, on his recollection especially of the speeches he had heard from some of them in the old Councils of State of the Commonwealth, when he had first the honour to sit there as Latin Secretary, and listen to their private debates.  What clearness then, what decisiveness, in such men as Vane and Bradshaw, on that “important article of Christianity,” the necessary distinctness of the Civil from the Religious!  Ah! could those old days be back!  He had written as if those days had not been satisfactory, as if the dispersion of his old masters of those days had been necessary; but, in so writing, had he not been too hasty?  So he had been asking himself of late; and though, as Richard’s Latin Secretary, and writing under his Protectorate, he had not said a word against the established Protectoral Government, he had expressed generally his conviction that England would never be right till either those charged with the Government should be men “discerning between Civil and Religious” or none but such should be charged with the Government.  Now, however, in May 1659, he might speak more plainly.  Richard’s Government had been swept away;—­Richard’s Parliament, which he had addressed, was no more in being; and, by a revolution which he had not expected, and in which he had taken no part, the pure Republic, with the relics of the Parliament that had first created it, was again the established order.  All round about him the men he respected most were exulting in the change, and calling it a revival of “the Good Old Cause.”  Without pronouncing on the change in all its aspects, he could join in the exultation for a special reason.  Would not the restored Republican Parliament and their Councils of State see it to be part of their duty to assert at last the principle of absolute Religious Voluntaryism?