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But, in his great love, Christ became incarnate for our salvation. Having taken our human nature by being born of a virgin, he had resting upon him all our exposures and liabilities. "He voluntarily submitted himself to the divine justice," and suffered death, the penalty due to human sin. So he made atonement, and redeemed all believers at the price of his own blood; as Michael teaches Adam:

Slain for bringing life;

But to the cross he nails thy enemies,
The law that is against thee, and the sins
Of all mankind, with him there crucified,
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust
In this his satisfaction.

We can object to these statements only upon the ground that the poet conceives of the relation of men to Adam and to Christ respectively in somewhat too formal and mechanical a way. If he had followed his Traducian view of the soul to its logical conclusions, it would have made him a sound Augustinian in his view. of sin, and an advocate of the ethical or realistic view of the atonement.

We pass these doctrines, however, to consider, in the sixth place, Milton's Eschatology. Here we can anticipate his conclusions from what we know of his premises. If soul and body are not two, but one and inseparable, then at death the whole man dies, soul and body together; and not till the resurrection, when the body is revived, does the soul live again. "The millions who have died since Adam"-I quote once more from his biographer" are all asleep, thick and sere as the au

A DOCTRINE OF SOUL-SLEEPING

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tumnal leaves in Vallombrosa; they shall not wake till the last trump stirs their multitudes. For the dead, however, the intervening time is annihilated. They die; but so far as their consciousness is concerned, they revive the next instant to be alive with Christ forever."

At this point too, Milton's later thinking carried him away both from Scripture teaching and from his earlier beliefs. We may well prefer the doctrine he held from 1637 to 1639 when, in "Il Penseroso," he spoke of unsphering

The spirit of Plato, to unfold

What worlds or what regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook.

or when, in "Lycidas," he wrote the most pathetic of all elegies for the friend of his youth drowned in the Irish Sea:

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more;

For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;

So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky;

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

Through the dear might of him that walked the waves,

Where other groves and other streams along,

With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and, singing, in their glory move,
And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.

But to the aged Milton all this was fancy and not fact. His dead friend was unconscious and would be unconscious until the morning of the resurrection. When should that morning dawn? Ah, the poet held, not only to soul-sleeping, but to the pre-millennial advent of Christ. The day of judgment with which Christ's coming is so closely connected in Scripture he believed to be no single day, marked by the rising and setting of the sun, but a period a thousand years in duration. Judgment to him was not so much an act as a long process, continuing through Christ's millennial reign on earth, and "wound up at last by a new revolt of Satan, his final overthrow, the sentencing of devils and bad men, the destruction of the world by fire, the banishment of the bad to hell, and the exaltation of the saints to a new heaven and a new earth created for their enjoyment."

The seventh and last point of Milton's theological belief which I can notice is his doctrine of the church. Here too, there was a constant progress from his early to his later years, and in my judgment, a progress on the whole toward truth rather than toward error. He began by being a Puritan member of the Established Church. When he entered the service of the State he was a strong Presbyterian, and his first political pamphlets were written in the interest of Presbyterial government in the Church of England. But he found that Presbyterianism at that time represented as much of intolerance and tyranny as belonged to the Roman Church. In his poem "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament," these lines

occur:

A BAPTIST DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

Because you have thrown off your Prelate Lord
And with stiff vows renounced his Liturgy,
To seize the widowed whore Plurality
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorr'd;
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword

To force our consciences that Christ set free,
And ride us with a classic hierarchy? . . .
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent
Would have been held in high esteem with Paul
Must now be named and printed heretics. . .
But we do hope to find out all your tricks . . .
When they shall read this clearly in your charge,
New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.

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As from being a Churchman he had become a Presbyterian, so from being a Presbyterian he became an Independent, or Congregationalist. The ideas of republican civil government that were gaining headway in the army had, as their correlative, ideas of absolute democracy in the government of the church. And then, ten years of further thought and experience made him theoretically a Baptist. Cromwell did not profess any particular opinion, but he was more nearly a Baptist than anything else, and Cromwell's influence was strong over Milton. The poet, however, was more consistent both in his republicanism and in his Independency than was Cromwell himself. Milton feared the monarchical tendencies of the protectorate; and, on the subject of absolute freedom of opinion, he was a monitor to the Protector. Not only did Milton hold, in theory at least, to the fundamental Baptist principle of separation of Church and State, but he agreed with Baptists in his rejection of infant baptism, and in his belief that immersion in water is the proper form of baptism. Infants, he says,

"are not to be baptized, inasmuch as they are incompetent to receive instruction, or to believe, or to enter into a covenant, or to promise or answer for themselves, or even to hear a word." Of baptism he thus speaks: "The bodies of believers, who engage themselves to pureness of life, are immersed in running water, to signify their regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and their union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection." These quotations are taken of course from his "Christian Doctrine," but, in the twelfth book of the "Paradise Lost," we have the following significant lines:

To teach all nations what of him they learned,
And his salvation, them who shall believe
Baptizing in the profluent stream, the sign
Of washing them from guilt of sin to life
Pure, and in mind prepared, if so befall,

For death like that which the Redeemer died.

I am far from maintaining that John Milton was ever himself immersed, or that he ever formally identified himself with any local Baptist church. I must add, indeed, that before the end of his days there came to be a Quaker element in his religion. He became indifferent to times and places of worship; he held the Sabbath to be abrogated, with the Mosaic law of which he considered it a part; in his latest years "he ceased to attend any church, he belonged to no religious communion, and he had no religious observances in his family. Considering the profoundly religious character of his mind," says Masson, "this excited considerable surmise among his friends, but he gave no explanation." The explanation, we may imagine, was simply this: The

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