“We have waited for liberty; but it must be God’s work and not man’s:  who thinks it sweet to maintain his pride and worldly interest to the gratifying of the flesh, whatever becomes of the precious liberty of mankind.  But let us not despond, but do our duty; God will carry on that blessed work, in despite of all opposites, and to their ruin if they persist therein.

“Sir, my humble request is that you would proceed, and give us that other member of the distribution mentioned in your book:  viz. that Hire doth greatly impede truth and liberty.  It is like, if you do, you shall find opposers; but remember that saying,_’Beatius est pati quam frui,’_ or, in the Apostle’s words, James V. 11. [Greek:  Makarizomen tous hypomenontas] [’We count them happy that endure’].  I have sometimes thought (concurring with your assertion) of that storied voice that should speak from heaven when Ecclesiastics were endowed with worldly preferments, ’Hodie venenum infunditur in Ecelesiam’ [’This day is poison poured into the Church’]; for, to use the speech of Gen. IV. ult., according to the sense which it hath in the Hebrew, ’Then began men to corrupt the worship of God.’  I shall tell you a supposal of mine; which is this:—­Mr. Durie has bestowed about thirty years’ time in travel, conference, and writing, to reconcile Calvinists and Lutherans, and that with little or no success.  But the shortest way were:—­Take away ecclesiastical dignities, honours, and preferments on both sides, and all would soon be hushed; those ecclesiastics would be quiet, and then the people would come forth into truth and liberty.  But I will not engage in this quarrel.  Yet I shall lay this engagement upon myself,—­to remain

  “Your faithful friend and servant,

  “M.  Wall.[1]

  “Causham:  May 26, 1659.”

[Footnote 1:  Copy in Ayscough:  MS. in British Museum, No. 4292 (f. 121); where the copyist “J.  Owen” (the Rev. J. Owen of Rochdale) certifies it as from the original.  It was printed, not very correctly, by Richard Baron, in 1756, in his preface to his edition of the Eikonoklastes.]

Here, from a man evidently after Milton’s own heart on the Church question, we have Milton’s welcome back into the ranks of the old Republicans.  And more and more through the five months of the first Restoration of the Rump (May 7—­Oct. 13) the friends of “the good old cause” had reason to know that Milton was again one of themselves.  It happens, indeed, that we have no more letters of his for the Restored Rump Government than the two of May 15, already quoted, which he wrote for the restored House, and which were signed by Speaker Lenthall.  Those two letters close the entire series of the known and extant State-Letters of Milton.  He and Marvell, however, were still in their Secretaryship, drawing their salaries as before; and of the completeness of Milton’s re-adherence to the Republican Government there is evidence more massive and striking than could have been furnished by any number of farther official letters by him for the Rump or its Council.