“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642scholarly Senecan moralist, Milton scoffs at his terse, antithetical, satiric sententiae,
heaps scorn on his “blabbing Bookes” and “toothlesse Satyrs,”^61 and constructs Hall
as the false prophet personified, the antithesis of himself as true prophet. He makes
Hall’s stylistic defects a mirror of his and the prelates’ moral defects: they are con-
cerned only with “superiority, pride, ease, and the belly” (665), and they have
“poyson’d and choak’d” the universities, producing a hireling clergy of “mercenary
stripplings” with “Simoniacall fathers” (718). He taunts them with insults – “Wipe
your fat corpulencies out of our light” (732) – and with derisive laughter: “Ha, ha,
ha” (726). Also, defending the Root and Branch petitioners against Hall’s elitist
dismissal of them as “Libellous Separatist” tradesmen, Milton offers a derisive sum-
mary of the bishops’ entire course of life:
Our great Clarks think that these men, because they have a Trade (as Christ himselfe,
and Saint Paul had) cannot therefore attaine to some good measure of knowledge, and
to a reason of their actions, as well as they that spend their youth in loitering, bezzling,
and harlotting, their studies in unprofitable questions, and barbarous sophistry, their
middle age in ambition, and idlenesse, their old age in avarice, dotage, and diseases.^62Responding to Hall’s charge that the Smectymnuans spit in the face of their Mother
Church, Milton offers a scathing revision of that family metaphor:
Marke Readers, the crafty scope of these Prelates, they endeavour to impresse deeply
into weak, and superstitious fancies the awfull notion of a mother, that hereby they
might cheat them into a blind and implicite obedience to whatsoever they shall de-
cree, or think fit... whatsoever they say she sayes, must be a deadly sin of disobedi-
ence not to beleeve. So that we who by Gods speciall grace have shak’n off the
servitude of a great male Tyrant, our pretended Father the Pope, should now, if we be
not betimes aware of these wily teachers, sink under the slavery of a Female notion... [and] make ourselves rather the Bastards, or the Centaurs of their spirituall
fornications.^63
His literary strategies include allegory – an extended representation of antiquity
as a giant idol, an “unactive, and liveless Colossus” that the iconoclastic weapon of
scripture will easily throw down and crumble “like the chaffe of the Summer thresh-
ing floores” (700). He also encapsulates his argument in a parable, presented as a law
case. A painstaking gardener (the minister of a congregation) carefully plants, weeds,
and maintains his garden, but is overborne by a strange gardener (the bishop) “that
never knew the soyle, never handl’d a Dibble or Spade to set the least potherbe that
grew there, much lesse had edur’d an houres sweat or chilnesse, and yet challenges
as his right the binding or unbinding of every flower, the clipping of every bush,
the weeding and worming of every bed” (the bishops’ power of discipline, jurisdic-
tion, and regulation of parishes). The native gardener refuses, but the stranger insists
that the Lord of the soil has given him this office and “ten fold your wages.” The