STILL UNDER THE BAN OF THE PRESBYTERIANS: TESTIMONY OF THE LONDON MINISTERS AGAINST HERESIES AND BLASPHEMIES: MILTON IN THE BLACK LIST.
Alas! Milton, busy with these occupations in his room looking out upon Lincoln's-Inn Fields, could not shut out the continued hue and cry after him on account of his Divorce heresy. It was more than two years since his wife had returned to him; he had then closed the controversy so far as it was a personal one; he was now respectably in routine, as a married man with one child. But the world round about, more especially the clerical part of it, had not forgiven him his Divorce Pamphlets. Were they not still in circulation, doing infinite harm? Had not their infamous doctrine become one of the heresies of the age, counting other unblushing exponents, and not a few practical adherents? Keep silence as he now might, move as he might from Aldersgate Street to Barbican and from Barbican to High Holborn, would not his dark reputation dog him, sit at his doorstep, and gaze in at his windows? Actually it did. The series of attacks on Milton for his Divorce Doctrine, begun by Herbert Palmer and other mouthpieces of the Westminster Assembly in 1644, and continued in that and subsequent years by the Stationers' Company, Featley, Paget, Prynne, Edwards, Baillie, and others, had not ceased at the close of 1647. One fresh attack, of some significance in itself, may be instanced as a sample of the rest.
London, it is to be remembered, was now under Presbyterian Church- government. In every parish there was the Parochial or Congregational Court, consisting of the minister and lay-elders, charged with all the ecclesiastical concerns of the parish, and with the right of spiritual censure over the parishioners. The parishes were also grouped into Classes of ministers and lay-elders. At last there had come into operation even the crowning device of Provincial Synods for all London, in which representative ministers and elders met to discuss metropolitan Church affairs generally and to revise the proceedings of Classes and Congregations. The first of these Provincial Synods, with Dr. Gouge for Prolocutor, had met in St. Paul's in May 1647, and had continued its sittings twice a week in Sion College till November 8, 1647, when its half-year of office expired, and it was succeeded by the Second Provincial Synod, under the Prolocutorship of Dr. Lazarus Seaman. Now, had London been perfect in its Presbytery according to the extreme rigour of the Scottish model, Milton could not possibly have escaped the clutch of one or other of these Church-judicatories. As a resident in Barbican, he had been, I think, in the parish of St. Botolph without Aldersgate; and, when he removed to High Holborn, he came into the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn. Had the Scottish strictness prevailed in London, the minister of either of these parishes would have felt himself bound to bring Milton before the parochial consistory for his Divorce heresy [Footnote: From Newcourt's Repertorium and Wood's Ath. III. 812, I learn that the Curate or Vicar of St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, "in the late rebellious times," was George Hall, a son of Bishop Hall and himself promoted to the Bishopric of Chester after the Restoration; and the Rector of St. Andrew's, Holborn, before the civil troubles was Dr. John Hacket, already well known to us (Vol. II. 225-8), and also afterwards a Bishop. Both of these, as strenuous Prelatists, must have been dispossessed from their charges long before the time with which we are now concerned; and I have not been able to ascertain who were their Presbyterian successors at this exact date.—There may be some significance in the fact that the parish minister before whom Milton's brother Christopher and his father-in-law Mr. Powell performed the necessary ceremony of taking the Covenant, with a view to their admission to compound for their Delinquency, was William Barton, minister of John Zachary (antè, p. 485 and p. 634). The parish of St. John Zachary was one of the parishes of Aldersgate Ward, and the church stood at the north-west corner of Maiden Lane, till it was burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666; after which it was not rebuilt, and the parish of St. John Zachary was united to that of St. Ann in the same ward. Had Milton found Mr. Barton of John Zachary's a more convenient minister to have dealings with than other ministers of the Aldersgate Street and Barbican neighbourhood; and did he attend Mr. Barton's church when he attended any? If so, and if we are right in identifying this William Barton with the minister of the same name whose Metrical Version of the Psalms was preferred by the Lords to Rous's (see antè, p. 425), their metrical sympathies may have had something to do with the connexion.—The fact that a son of Bishop Hall's was Curate or Vicar of St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, at the time when the Bishop and another son of his were attacking Milton for his part in the Smectymnuan controversy, and speaking of him as then living in a "suburb sink about London," and collecting gossip about him, was not known to me when I was engaged on that part of the Biography (Vol. II. p. 390 et seq.); but it may be worth remembering even now.]; or, if the duty had been neglected, Classis IV., to which the parish of St. Botolph belonged, or Classis VIII., to which the parish of St. Andrew belonged, would have interfered; or, finally, in the case of so notorious an offender, the Provincial Synod itself would not have been asleep. True, the censure that could have been inflicted would only have been spiritual; but, by zealous management, especially if the culprit were obstinate, such spiritual censure might have led to farther prosecution by the secular courts. Certainly, if Milton had been in Scotland, this would have happened. Certainly it would have happened in London if the English Presbyterians had succeeded in subjecting that city to the grip of their absolute or ideal Presbytery. But they had not succeeded, and it was their constant lamentation that they had not. Though the Presbyterian organization of London had been voted on trial, the Congregationalist principle still asserted itself in the existence of many independent congregations and meeting-houses; though sometimes interfering with the less respectable of these, Parliament and the law- courts had taken no steps for their general suppression; and, by belonging to one of them, a Londoner of peculiar opinions might have the comfort and respectability of being a church-goer like his neighbours, and yet avoid unpleasant inquisitorship. Then, again, through what the ultra-Presbyterians regarded as the Erastian backwardness of Parliament, those offences for which the parochial or other Church-judicatories might inflict even spiritual censures had been very strictly defined. Only for certain faults of ignorance or of scandalous life, enumerated and specified by Act of Parliament, could the Presbyterian Church- judicatories debar from the communion; in any case lying beyond that range they could not act without reference to the superior authority of a great Parliamentary Commission (antè, pp. 399, 405, 423). Sore had been the complaints of the Presbyterians over this limitation of the powers of Church discipline, as well as over the negligence of Parliament in not having yet passed such an Act against Heresies and Blasphemies as might enable the State to use the sterner discipline of fines, imprisonment, scourging, and hanging, in aid of true Christianity. Even as things were, however, it may be wondered that some zealot did not try to bring Milton's case within the powers actually assigned to the Church-courts, or to push it on the notice of the secular judges in virtue of such Acts as did exist against Heresy. There was very good reason, however, for not making the experiment. It had already been tried and bad failed. Twice had Milton's case been brought before Parliament, and Parliament had distinctly declined to trouble him. Evidently, whatever the hotter Presbyterians desired, Milton was safe in the respect entertained for him personally by some of those who were at the head of affairs, or in an opinion prevailing in high quarters that the publication of a new speculation on Divorce was not an offence for which a man otherwise eminent ought to be questioned at law.
What cannot be done in one way, however, may sometimes be done in another. Not only was London the central stronghold of English Presbyterianism; the power of Presbyterianism there centralized was a kind of Proteus. One of its forms was the Westminster Assembly, a large nucleus of which consisted of ministers from London and the suburbs; another, since May 1647, was the London Provincial Synod. But, in aid of these two bodies, and including many that belonged to both, there was a third, of vaguer character, in that Sion College conclave which the London clergy had instituted of their own accord for the concoction of notions that might take shape in the Assembly or the Synod (antè, p. 394). Now, in December 1647, this Sion College conclave, "since they could do no more," sent forth a Presbyterian manifesto of some magnitude. It was "A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant; as also against the Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these times, and the Toleration of them: wherein is inserted a Catalogue of the said Errors, &c.: subscribed by the Ministers of Christ within the Province of London, Dec. 14, 1647."
This Testimony, which was immediately published, [Footnote: London: Printed by A. M. for Tho. Underhill at the Bible in Wood Street: 1648.] bore the signatures of 58 London ministers in all, of whom 41 signed to the whole document, while 17, being members of Assembly, abstained from signing to those parts that related particularly to the Confession of Faith and the Directory of Worship, not because they did not thoroughly approve of those parts, but because they thought themselves precluded, by constitutional etiquette, from publicly affirming portions of the Assembly's work which still waited full Parliamentary sanction. All the 58, however, subscribed to that main portion of the Testimony which consisted in an enumeration, and condemnation of certain "abominable errors, damnable heresies, and horrid blasphemies." Among the seventeen members of Assembly so subscribing were Dr. Lazarus Seaman of Allhallows, Bread Street (Milton's native parish), then Prolocutor of the London Provincial Synod; Dr. Gouge of Blackfriars, ex-Prolocutor of the same; Dr. Hoyle of Stepney, Dr. Tuckney, and Messrs. Gataker, Calamy, Ashe and Case; and among the forty-one others were Samuel Clarke of Benetfink, Christopher Love of Anne's, Aldersgate, John Downam of Allhallows, Thames Street, Henry Roborough, one of the scribes of the Assembly and minister of Leonard's, Eastcheap, and John Wallis, sub-clerk of the Assembly, now uniting as well as he could the duties of that office and the parish-cure of Gabriel's, Fenchurch Street, with his mathematical proclivities and his association with the "physicists" of the Invisible College. And what were the errors, heresies, and blasphemies, thus publicly certified against by these London divines and the rest? They were classified with great punctuality under nineteen heads, each head being subdivided into specific varieties of error, and the chief heretics under each openly named. First came Anti-Scripturism, or "Errors against the divine authority of Holy Scriptures," associated with the names of John Goodwill and Laurence Clarkson; then, in four heads and their subdivisions, came Anti-Trinitarianism, or "Errors against the nature and essence of God, against the Trinity, against the Deity of the Son of God, and against the Deity and divine worship of the Holy Ghost," the culprits named for chief condemnation in this department being Biddle and Paul Best; and so on the catalogue proceeds through various forms of Arminianism, Antinomianism, Seekerism, Anti-Sabbatarianism, Antipædobaptism, Anabaptism, Materialism or Mortalism, ending in Tolerationism. Among the Arminians denounced as notorious are Paul Best again, Paul Hobson, but especially John Goodwin again, and the Episcopalian and Royalist Dr. Henry Hammond, whose Practical Catechism, published in 1644, is cited as full of Arminian error. Among the Antinomians are denounced Randall, Simson, Eaton, Crisp, and Erbury; among the Seekers, Saltmarsh and Jos. Salmon; among the Anti- Sabbatarians, Saltmarsh again; among the Antipædobaptists and Anabaptists, Saltmarsh again, Tombes, and Webb. In a special group, as opposing magistracy and lawful oaths, are mentioned Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton, and Dr. Henry Hammond again; the chief representative of the tremendous doctrine of Materialism or the Denial of the Immortality of the Soul is R. O., the anonymous author of the tract on Man's Mortality; and among the leading Tolerationists or representatives of the grand error of Liberty of Conscience, "patronizing and promoting all other errors, heresies, and blasphemies whatsoever," are named Roger Williams again and Paul Best again.—One head or department in this long black list we have reserved. It is the 17th in order, including "Errors touching Marriage and Divorce." Here the anonymous author of a pamphlet called Little Nonsuch, published in 1646, bears the brunt of the obloquy, on account of the opinion that, as "that marriage is most just which is made without any ambitious or covetous end," so, "if this liking and mutual correspondency happen betwixt the nearest of kindred, then it is also the most natural, the most lawful, and according to the primitive (Patriarchal) purity and practice." But Milton comes in company with this Little Nonsuch, as hardly less worthy of execration on account of his Divorce Doctrine. The main proposition of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is extracted textually from page 6 of the Second or 1644 Edition of that treatise, to show what a dreadful doctrine had been there maintained; but, in case this should not seem enough, the Testifying Divines, in the marginal note where they give the reference, add the words, "Peruse the whole book." They do not name Milton fully, but only by his initials "J. M.," as on the title-page of his Treatise. [Footnote: There is a general account of this Testimony of the London ministers in Dec. 1647 in Neal's Puritans, III. 359-363; but the account in the text is from the published copy of the Testimony itself.]
Sold at the shop of that very Underhill in Wood Street who had been the publisher of three of Milton's own pamphlets in the Smectymnuan Controversy in 1641 (antè, p. 450), this Testimony of the London ministers had an extensive circulation. It was adopted, in fact, as the authorized manifesto of all the English Presbyterianism then most militant for that full right of ecclesiastical and civil control over heresy and its dissemination which Parliament hitherto had refused to recognise. In a short time, accordingly, it received the adhesion of 64 ministers in Gloucestershire, 84 in Lancashire, 83 in Devonshire, and 71 in Somersetshire. Nor was this subscription of the same printed document by 360 of the most active Presbyterian ministers throughout England a mere appeal to public opinion. It was intended as an aid to Presbyterianism in its anxious endeavour to obtain even yet all it wanted from Parliament. One observes, for example, that, within a month after the manifesto of the London ministers had gone forth from Sion College, i.e. on the 12th of January, 1647-8, a petition was presented to Parliament by the London Provincial Synod itself, praying for various extensions and amendments of the Presbyterian system in the City, among which was the better establishment of Church censures for notorious and scandalous offenders. [Footnote: Neal's Puritans, III. 359-363; and Lords Journals, Jan. 12, 1647-8; but see also Halley's Lancashire and its Puritanism (1869), I. 467 et seq.]
At least two of the heretics denounced in the Sion College manifesto published replies. The Royalist Dr. Henry Hammond thought it worth while to defend his Practical Catechism in a tract called Views of some Exceptions, &c. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 494-5.] John Goodwin of Coleman Street, who had been more largely attacked, and who indeed had reason to believe that the manifesto was mainly directed against himself, replied with his usual cool stoutness in a pamphlet called Sion College Visited. He there rebukes his accusers for their uncharitableness, unfairness, and malice in seeking to "exasperate the sword of the civil magistrate" against pious and peaceable citizens who had done them no injury. [Footnote: Jackson's Life of Goodwin. 172-175.] In effect, this reply of Goodwin's answered for the others as well as for himself. Milton, at all events, let the thing pass unnoticed. Entering his house in High Holborn, it may have been enough for him to repeat to himself, by way of comment, the lines he had already written—
"I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, arid dogs;"
or perhaps, by way of more determinate conclusion, his other and ever famous line,
"New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large."