Skinner
hastened to save himself from the fate which in 1681 befel Locke, and
gave up to the Secretary of State, not only the Latin letters, but the
MS. of the theological treatise. Nothing further was known as to the
fate of the MS. till 1823, when it was disinterred from one of the
presses of the old State Paper Office. The Secretary of State, Sir
Joseph Williamson, when he retired from office in 1678, instead of
carrying away his correspondence as had been the custom, left it
behind him. Thus it was that the _Treatise of Christian doctrine_
first saw light, one hundred and fifty years after the author's death.
In a work which had been written as a text-book for the use of
learners, there can be little scope for originality. And Milton
follows the division of the matter into heads usual in the manuals
then current. But it was impossible for Milton to handle the dry bones
of a divinity compendium without stirring them into life. And divinity
which is made to live, necessarily becomes unorthodox.
The usual method of the school text-books of the seventeenth
century was to exhibit dogma in the artificial terminology of the
controversies of the sixteenth century.
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