When he wrote his _Reason of Church Government_
(1642), he is still a royalist; not in the cavalier sense of a person
attached to the reigning sovereign, or the Stuart family, but still
retaining the belief of his age that monarchy in the abstract had
somewhat of divine sanction. Before 1649, the divine right of
monarchy, and the claim of Presbytery to be scriptural, have yielded
in his mind to a wider conception of the rights of the man and the
Christian. To use the party names of the time, Milton the Presbyterian
has expanded into Milton the Independent. There is to be no State
Church, and instead of a monarchy there is to be a commonwealth.
Very soon the situation developes the important question how this
commonwealth shall be administered--whether by a representative
assembly, or by a picked council, or a single governor. This question
was put to a test in the Parliament of 1654. The experiment of a
representative assembly, begun in September 1654, broke down in
January 1655. Before it was tried we find Milton in his _Second
Defence_, in May 1654, recommending Cromwell to govern not by a
Parliament, but by a council of officers; i.
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