seem to advise, I have no thought whatever [longe absum]:  they are worthier of silence than of commemoration.  What is needed is not one to compile a good history of our troubles, but one who can happily end the troubles themselves; for, with you, I fear lest, amid these our civil discords, or rather sheer madnesses, we shall seem to the lately confederated enemies of Liberty and Religion a too fit object of attack, though in truth they have not yet inflicted a severer wound on Religion than we ourselves have been long doing by our crimes.  But God, as I hope, on His own account, and for His own glory, now in question, will not allow the counsels and onsets of the enemy to succeed as they themselves wish, whatever convulsions Kings and Cardinals meditate and design.  Meanwhile, for the Protestant Synod of Loudun, which you tell me is so soon to meet [Milton does not seem to know that it had been sitting already for six weeks] I pray—­what has never happened to any Synod yet—­a happy issue, not of the Nazianzenian sort,[1] and am of opinion that the issue of this one will be happy enough if, should they decree nothing else, they should decree the expulsion of Morus.  Of my posthumous adversary, as soon as he makes his appearance, be good enough to give me the earliest information.  Farewell.

  “Westminster:  December 20, 1659.”

[Footnote 1:  The allusion seems to be to the great OEcumenical Council of Constantinople in 381, which confirmed Gregory Nazianzen in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and in which Gregory presided for some time and inefficiently.]

  TO THE NOBLE YOUTH, RICHARD JONES.

“For the long break in your correspondence with me your excuses are truly most modest, inasmuch as you might with more justice accuse me of the same fault; and, as the case stands, I am really at a loss to know whether I should have preferred your not having been in fault to your having apologised so finely.  On no account let it ever come into your mind that I measure your gratitude, if anything of the kind is due to me from you, by your constancy in letter-writing.  My feeling of your gratitude to me will be strongest when the fruits of those services of mine to you of which you speak shall appear not so much in frequent letters as in your perseverance and laudable proficiency in excellent pursuits.  You have rightly marked out for yourself the path of virtue in that theatre of the world on which you have entered; but remember that the path is common so far to virtue and vice, and that you have yet to advance to where the path divides itself into two.  And you ought now betimes to prepare yourself for leaving this common path, pleasant and flowery, and for being able the more readily, with your own will, though with labour and danger, to climb that arduous and difficult one which is the slope of virtue only.  For this you have great advantages over others, believe me, in having secured so faithful and skilful a guide.  Farewell.

  “Westminster:  December 20, 1659.”