“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642“petty-fog of witnesses” (648), “offalls and sweepings” (651). And the contrast
between the true and perfect gospel and corrupt ancient authorities is again ren-
dered in striking metaphors of the body and family relationships:
We doe injuriously in thinking to tast better the pure Evangelick Manna by seasoning
our mouths with the tainted scraps, and fragments of an unknown table; and searching
among the verminous and polluted rags dropt overworn from the toyling shoulders of
Time, with these deformedly to quilt, and interlace the intire, the spotlesse, and
undecaying robe of Truth, the daughter not of Time, but of Heaven, only bred up
heer below in Christian hearts, between two grave & holy nurses the Doctrine, and
Discipline of the Gospel (639).At about the same time (June 26, 1641) the Smectymnuans published their 219-
page answer to Hall, addressed to the two houses of parliament and entitled A
Vindication of the Answer to the Humble Remonstrance, from the Unjust Imputations of
Frivolousnesse and Falsehood: Wherein the Cause of Liturgy and Episcopacy is further de-
bated. Complaining vigorously about the Remonstrant’s scoffs and taunts, they an-
swer his charges point for point, reviewing the biblical evidence against episcopacy
and a required liturgy and for Presbyterian church government.^58 During these
weeks Milton was also working on his answer to Hall, a sharply satiric and some-
times scurrilous anonymous tract, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence, Against
Smectymnuus, probably published in July. Now thoroughly out of patience with
arguments about ancient sources, he promises to spare the reader an immersion in
the “labyrinth of controversall antiquity” (such as his last tract demanded), and
instead to show “truth vindicated, and Sophistry taken short at the first false bound.”^59
He engages Hall’s tract section by section, using the common polemic strategy of
extracting passages from Hall and appending to each, dialogue-wise, a sharp rejoin-
der or argument.^60 He proudly claims association with the Smectymnuans and other
reformers – “these free-spoken, and plaine harted men that are the eyes of their
Country, and the prospective glasses of their Prince” (CPW I, 670) – but he es-
chews their moderate tone. Instead, his preface works out more fully a poetics of
satire, and a justification for vehement invective as an appropriate use of “those two
most rationall faculties of humane intellect anger and laughter.” “Grim laughter,”
he insists, “hath oft-times a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting”
(663–4). He finds precedent for such satire in Solomonic precept and Christian
example, and he also places himself in the line of iconoclastic prophets who were
“Transported with the zeale of truth to a well heated fervencie” (663): Daniel
destroying the image of Nebuchadnezzar or Elijah destroying Baal (699–700).
Milton’s strategy here is to discredit Hall and the bishops by a steady onslaught of
scurrilous gibes, invective, scornful epithets, sarcasm, hyperbolic parody, puns, and
(again) degrading images of the body. Targeting Hall’s literary reputation as verse
satirist and the polemic persona he has fashioned for himself as a tolerant, moderate,