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God, separated from Him only in so far as He has implanted independence and free will into parts of it. Hence the ordinary distinction between soul and body in man is repudiated by Milton. Soul and body, he holds, are one and inseparable; Man is a body-soul or a soul-body, and is propagated as such from father to son. From this proposition it is one of his deductions that soul and body die together, or, in other words, that there is a total cessation or suspension of personal consciousness between Death and the Resurrection. In such a future Resurrection, or sudden and miraculous reawakening to life of all that have lived and died in the world, Milton declares himself a profound believer. He connects his hope thereof with the Millenarian doctrine of Christ's second coming and of a consequent day of universal judgment, a conflagration or destruction otherwise of the present cosmos, and the succession of a new and grander system of things, in which the perfectly glorified saints and the wicked shall have their several eternal portions, the wicked in some hell, and the saints in the empyrean heaven, or in some new heavens and earth created for them. All this and much more he professes to have derived from the Bible, which he declares again and again to be the sole external rule of Christian faith, to be studied and interpreted by every man for himself, and with texts from which, in masses and coagulations, his treatise is full from first to last. From the same authority he professes to have derived the system of ethics and of church policy which his treatise propounds. He regards the Decalogue as abolished with the rest of the Mosaic Law, and continued literal adhesion to it as inconsistent with true Christian liberty. Hence he is an anti-Sabbatarian, finding no authority for the substitution of the first day of the week for the Jewish Sabbath, and no higher reason for the observance of that day than Christian consent and general convenience. His views of Church discipline are those of Independency or Congregationalism, with a marked tendency to absolute Individualism, or to a kind of Quakerism in some things; and he goes with the Baptists or Anti-Pædobaptists in their particular tenet. He dissents positively from the Quakers in their extreme doctrine of peace or passivity, and in other matters, holding war to be often lawful, resistance by arms to tyranny to be lawful, and finding Scripture warrant also for prayers for curses and calamities upon bad men and enemies. Perhaps the part of the treatise that most shocks modern opinion is that where, not content with repeating his old doctrine of the lawfulness of divorce in cases of mutual incompatibility, he inserts a defence or justification of polygamy. But the treatise generally, it will be seen, contains not a few heterodoxies.

THE MINOR POEMS

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