Disestablishment, Toleration, the New Testament Nation: Milton's Late Religious Tracts

Learning to Stand: <em>Paradise Regained</em> Today

“…Many of Milton's late 1650s tracts warn insistently against the voluntary return by an unfaithful nation to the bondage of Egypt. 20 In The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), for example, Milton sets out in detail the alternative options still open for an English commonwealth and, with ever heightening emotive rhetoric, cautions against the tyranny of Stuart absolutism. The resonant plea to the English people to avoid the calamity of a return to the "bondage" of monarchical government pulls no punches.…”

Rethinking church and state during the English Interregnum

“…This was Milton's first public writing in English in a decade, and it is framed by a wider debate about the framework of religious and civil government, a national church, tithes and religious toleration. For example, in his Aphorisms , James Harrington linked liberty of conscience with a national religion, and a national religion to ‘an endowed clergy’. Others were more sceptical: a ‘Wellwisher’ to England's peace noted that ‘this State’ would never be settled unless it was built upon civil and religious liberties.…”