With Milton, as with the whole
Calvinistic and Puritan Europe, woman was a creature of an inferior
and subordinate class. Man was the final cause of God's creation, and
woman was there to minister to this nobler being. In his dogmatic
treatise, _De doctrina Christiana_, Milton formulated this sentiment
in the thesis, borrowed from the schoolmen, that the soul was
communicated "in semine patris." The cavalier section of society had
inherited the sentiment of chivalry, and contrasted with the roundhead
not more by its loyalty to the person of the prince, than by its
recognition of the superior grace and refinement of womanhood. Even in
the debased and degenerate epoch of court life which followed 1660,
the forms and language of homage still preserved the tradition of a
nobler scheme of manners. The Puritan had thrown off chivalry as being
parcel of Catholicism, and had replaced it by the Hebrew ideal of the
subjection and seclusion of woman. Milton, in whose mind the rigidity
of Puritan doctrine was now contending with the freer spirit of
culture and romance, shows on the present occasion a like conflict of
doctrine with sentiment.
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