C'est au commencement de la guerre civile que Milton écrivait cela: il n'était pas encore républicain.
[472]:.... As if they could make God earthly and fleshy, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual, they began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form.... They hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocence, but of pure linnen, with other deformed and fantastick dresses, in palls and mitres, and guegaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe, or the Flamin's vestry. Then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his Liturgies and his Lurries, till the soul by these means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshy delights, bated her wing apace downward; and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous collegue the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high-soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and drailing carcase to plod on the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity. (Of Reformation in England.)
[473]: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered, unexercised and unbreathed virtue, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. (P. 429.)
[474]: He never left baiting and goring the successor of his best Lord Constantine by his barking curses and excommunications. (P. 264.)
[475]: No envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring. (P. 427.)
[476]: Whatsoever either time or the heedless hand of blind chance has drawn down to this present in her huge drag-net, whether fish or sea-weed, shells, or shrubs, unpick'd, unchosen, those are the Fathers. (On Prelatical Episcopacy.)
[477]: For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a kind of martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and soft essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.
[478]: The Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth or perfected those catalogues, and expurging Indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author with a violation worse than any that could be offered to his tomb. (P. 426.)
[479]: A man may be an heretic in the truth if he believes things only because his pastor says so.... The very truth he holds becomes his heresie.... A wealthy man addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon his trade.... What does he therefore, but resolves to give over toyling and to find himself out some factor to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs? Some Divine of note, and estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, in his custody; and indeed makes the person of this man his religion. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supt, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises, is saluted, and, after the malmsey, or some well-spiced beverage, and better breakfasted, his religion walks abroad at night, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion.
[480]: Quand il est simplement comique, il arrive comme Swift et Hogarth à la bizarrerie rude et drolatique: «A bishop's foot that has all his toes (maugre the gout) and a linen sock over it, is the aptest emblem of the prelat himself; who being a pluralist may, under one surplice, hide four benefices, besides that great metropolitan toe.»