acquiesce in that third course which was proposed by the House itself, viz. the enlargement of the House by a competent number of new writs issued by itself under a careful scheme of qualification for electing or being eligible, he had left a very vague impression as to his real preference.  Now to Milton, as to all other ardent Commonwealth’s men, the vital question was which of these three courses was to be taken.  To adopt either of the two first was to subvert the Commonwealth.  To re-admit the secluded members into the present House was to convert it into a House with an overwhelming Presbyterian majority, and to bring back the days of Presbyterian ascendancy, with the prospect of a restoration of Royalty on merely Presbyterian terms.  To summon what was called a new full and free Parliament was, all but certainly, to bring back Royalty by a more hurried process still.  Only by the third method, the Rump’s own method, did there seem a chance of preserving the Republican constitution; and yet Monk’s assent to it had been but hesitating and uncertain.  More ominous still had been his few words intimating his wishes in the matter of ecclesiastical policy.  He could conceive nothing so good, on the whole, as the Scottish Presbyterianism he had been living amidst for the last few years, and he thought that the ‘sober interest’ in England, steering between the ‘Cavalier party’ on the one side and the ‘Fanatic party’ on the other, would be most secure by keeping to a moderate Presbytery in the State-Church.  That Milton’s views as to the merits of Scottish Presbytery were not Monk’s is an old story, needing no repetition here.  What must have concerned him was to see Monk not only at one with the great mass of his countrymen on the subject of a Church-Establishment, but actually retrograde on the question of the desirable nature of such an Establishment, inasmuch as he seemed to signal his countrymen back out of Cromwell’s broad Church of mixed Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, into a Church more strictly on the Presbyterian model.  Then another unpleasant novelty in Monk’s case was his fondness for the phrases Fanatics, Fanatic Notions, the Fanatic Party.  The phrases were not new; but Monk had sent them out of Scotland before him, and had brought them himself out of Scotland, with a new significance.  Very probably they had been supplied to him out of the vocabulary of his Scottish clerical adviser Mr. James Sharp, or of the Scottish Resolutioner clergy generally.  At all events, it is from and after the date of Monk’s march into England that one finds the name Fanatics a common one for all those Commonwealth’s men collectively who opposed a State-Church or the moderate Presbyterian or semi-Presbyterian form of it.  Had Monk drawn out a list of his ‘Fanatics,’ he would have had to put Milton himself at the top of them, with Vane, Harrison, Barebone, and the leading Quakers.