If it is true—­and the fact seems well attested—­that Milton’s poetical vein flowed only from the autumnal equinox to the vernal[5], he cannot well have commenced “Paradise Lost” before the death of Cromwell, or have made very great progress with it ere his conception of his duty called him away to questions of ecclesiastical policy.  The one point on which he had irreconcilably differed from Cromwell was that of a State Church; Cromwell, the practical man, perceiving its necessity, and Milton, the idealist, seeing only its want of logic.  Unfortunately, this inconsequence existed only for the few thinkers who could in that age rise to the acceptance of Milton’s premises.  In his “Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,” published in February, 1659, he emphatically insists that the civil magistrate has neither the right nor the power to interfere in matters of religion, and concludes:  “The defence only of the Church belongs to the magistrate.  Had he once learnt not further to concern himself with Church affairs, half his labour might be spared and the commonwealth better tended.”  It is to be regretted that he had not entered upon this great subject at an earlier period.  The little tract, addressed to the Republican members of Parliament, is designedly homely in style, and the magnificence of Milton’s diction is still further tamed down by the necessity of resorting to dictation.  It is nevertheless a powerful piece of argument, in its own sphere of abstract reason unanswerable, and only questionable in that lower sphere of expediency which Milton disdained.  In the following August appeared a sequel with the sarcastic title, “Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church.”  The recipe is simple and efficacious—­cease to hire them, and they will cease to be hirelings.  Suppress all ecclesiastical endowments, and let the clergyman be supported by free-will offerings.  The fact that this would have consigned about half the established clergy to beggary does not trouble him; nor were they likely to be greatly troubled by a proposal so sublimely impracticable.  Vested interests can only be over-ridden in times of revolution, and 1659, in outward appearance a year of anarchy, was in truth a year of reaction.  For the rest, it is to be remarked that Milton scarcely allowed the ministry to be followed as a profession, and that his views on ecclesiastical organization had come to coincide very nearly with those now held by the Plymouth Brethren.

There is much plausibility in Pattison’s comparison of the men of the Commonwealth disputing about matters of this sort on the eve of the Restoration, to the Greeks of Constantinople contending about the Azymite controversy while the Turks were breaching their walls.  In fact, however, this blindness was not confined to one party.  Anthony Wood, a Royalist, writing thirty years afterwards, speaks of the Restoration as an event which no man expected in September, 1659.