ars, a scheme of logic, digested on the plan of M. De la Ramée, a learned French Huguenot, who closed a life of remarkable vicissitude at Paris on the ghastly eve of St. Bartholo

mew.

Milton was especially attracted towards Ramée by the rebellion of his logic against the artificial and antichristian system of Aristotle and the schoolmen, an assault which Martin Luther had powerfully commenced years before from his professorial chair at Wittenburg, and which had ever since been spiritedly continued by the philosophical adherents of the Reformation.

Though Milton's bodily infirmities daily increased, and his lamp of life began to flicker ominously, his ardor of composition was not. stifled by the hand of disease, nor extinguished by the damp of blindness and age.

In 1673, attracted and alarmed by the rapid and insidious progress which Catholicism, under the active, open countenance of the Duke of York, afterwards James II., was making in Great Britain, Milton wrote his last elaborate prose work, entitled, "A Treatise of

True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and the best Means which may be used to Prevent the Growth of Popery." In this pamphlet, showing that "the great interests of man were uniformly the leading objects of his regard," he paints vividly the dangers arising from Jesuitism; "strongly inculcates the doctrine of mutual forbearance and essential union among those Christians of every denomination who appeal to the holy Scriptures for the rule of their faith;" and excludes from his scheme of ample toleration the Roman see alone, as being not so much a religious sect as a meddlesome foreign propaganda, inimical not only to the ecclesiastical, but to the civil welfare and liberty of England.

"Let us now inquire," he says, "whether Popery be tolerable or no. Popery is a double thing to deal with, and claims a twofold power, ecclesiastical and political, both usurped, and the one sustaining the other.

"But the ecclesiastical is ever pretended to the political. The pope, by this mixed fac-~ulty, pretends right to kingdoms and states, and especially to this of England, thrones and un

thrones kings, and absolves the people from their obedience to them; sometimes interdicts to whole nations the public worship of God, shutting up their churches; and was wont to draw away the greatest part of the wealth of this then miserable land as part of his patrimony, to maintain the pride and luxury of his court and prelates; and now since, through the infinite mercy and favor of God, we have shaken off his Babylonish yoke, hath not ceased, by his spies and agents, bulls and emissaries, once to destroy both king and Parliament, perpetually to seduce, corrupt, and pervert as many as they can of the people. Whether therefore it be fit or reasonable to tolerate men thus principled in religion towards the state, I submit it to the consideration of all magistrates, who are best able to provide for their own and the public safety."

But towards the Papists he was not in favor of exercising any personal harshness or severity. "Are we," he asks, "to punish them by corporal punishments or fines in their estates on account of their religion? I sup

pose it stands not with the clemency of the

gospel more than what appertains to the security of the state."

"The best means to abate Popery," he says, "arises from the constant reading of Scripture. The Papal antichristian church permits not the laity to read the Bible in her own tongue. Our Protestant church, on the contrary, hath proposed it to all men, and to this end translated it into English, with profitable notes to what is met with obscure, though what is most necessary to know is still plainest, that all sorts and degrees of men not understanding it in the original, may read it in their mother tongue; wherein believers who agree in the main are everywhere exhorted to mutual forbearance and charity towards one another, though dissenting in some opinions. It is written that the coat of our Saviour was without seam; whence some would infer that there should be no division in the church of Christ. It should be so indeed; yet seams in the same cloth neither hurt the cloth nor misbecome it; and not only seams, but schisms will be while men are fallible. But if they dissent in matters not essential to belief while the com

mon adversary is in the field, and stand jarring and pelting at one another, they will be soon routed and subdued.

"It is human frailty to err, and no man is infallible here on earth," says Milton. Then, after enumerating different Christian sects, he says of such as "profess to set the word of God only before them as the rule of their faith and obedience, and use all diligence and sincerity of heart by reading, by learning, by study, by prayer for illumination of the Holy Spirit, to understand this rule and obey it, they have done whatever man can do. God will assuredly pardou them, as he did the friends of Job, good and pious men, though much mistaken, as there it appears, in some points of doctrine. But some will say, with Christians it is otherwise, whom God has promised by his Spirit to teach all things. True, all things absolutely necessary to salvation; but the hottest disputes among Protestants, calmly and charitably examined, will be found less than such." Of these Protestants he adds,

"It cannot be denied that the authors or late revivers of all these sects or opinions