..."
On a review of all these indications of feeling, I should conclude
that Milton never had serious thoughts of a college fellowship, and
that his antipathy arose from a sense of his own incompatibility of
temper with academic life, and was not, like Phineas Fletcher's, the
result of disappointed hopes, and a sense of injury for having been
refused a fellowship at King's. One consideration which remains to be
mentioned would alone be decisive in favour of this view. A fellowship
required orders. Milton had been intended for the church, and had been
sent to college with that view. By the time he left Cambridge, at
twenty-four, it had become clear, both to himself and his family, that
he could never submit his understanding to the trammels of church
formularies. His later mind, about 1641, is expressed by himself
in his own forcible style,--"The church, to whose service by the
intention of my parents and friends I was destined of a child, and
in mine own resolutions, till coming to some maturity of years, and
perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the church, that he who would
take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal.
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