The religious sentiment of his day was offended by his
vigorous vindication of the freewill of man against the reigning
Calvinism, and his assertion of the inferiority of the Son in
opposition to the received Athanasianism. He labours this point of the
nature of God with especial care, showing how greatly it occupied
his thoughts. He arranges his texts so as to exhibit in Scriptural
language the semi-Arian scheme, i.e. a scheme which, admitting the
co-essentiality, denies the eternal generation. Through all this
manipulation of texts we seem to see, that Milton is not the school
logician erecting a consistent fabric of words, but that he is
dominated by an imagination peopled with concrete personalities, and
labouring to assign their places to the Father and the Son as separate
agents in the mundane drama. The _De doctrina Christiana_ is the prose
counterpart of _Paradise Lost_ and _Regained_, a caput mortuum of the
poems, with every ethereal particle evaporated.
In the royal injunctions of 1614, James I. had ordered students in the
universities not to insist too long upon compendiums, but to study the
Scriptures, and to bestow their time upon the fathers and councils.
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