“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642the authorial self he presented in Reason of Church-governement. The Apology contin-
ues fierce attacks on the bishops and the liturgy, setting against them the spirit of the
gospel and its meritocratic implications for the church. If men were children under
the law, “the Gospell is our manhood” (950), so the laity – “divers plaine and solid
men, that have learnt by the experience of a good conscience, what it is to be well
taught” (935) – can be trusted to judge ministers.
Stylistically, the Apology ranges from fierce invective to lofty praise. The satire is
trenchant, and often based (again) on graphic body imagery: “This tormenter of
semicolons is as good at dismembring and slitting sentences, as his grave Fathers the
Prelates have bin at stigmatizing & slitting noses” (894). “A more seditious and
Butcherly Speech no Cell of Loyola could have belch’t” (896). “Ye have started
back from the purity of Scripture which is the only rule of reformation, to the old
vomit of your Traditions” (912). Quoting Horace and Gower, Milton makes stylis-
tic vigor and satiric vehemence a touchstone for moral force and devotion to truth.
His opponents’ dullness and faults of style are themselves evidence of their vacuity
and lukewarmness in God’s service. Hall’s seductive rhetoric and fashionable curt
Senecan aphorisms and sententiae are disparaged as a “coy flurting stile” and “frumps
and curtall jibes” (872–3).^76 His Mundus alter & idem is “the idlest and the paltriest
Mime that ever mounted upon banke” (880). The Confuter “comes so lazily on in
a Similie... and demeanes himselfe in the dull expression so like a dough kneaded
thing, that he hath not spirit anough left him... as to avoide nonsense” (910). A
comparable failure of energy and spirit convicts the required Anglican liturgy, which
is “in conception leane and dry, of affections empty and unmoving, of passion, or
any heigth whereto the soule might soar upon the wings of zeale, destitute and
barren.”^77 Similarly, the Anglican pulpits display “the lofty nakednesse of your
Latinizing Barbarian, and the finicall goosery of your neat Sermon-actor” (935). By
contrast, Milton claims to be a rhetorician in Augustine’s terms, according to which
rhetoric and style flow naturally from devotion to truth:
Although I cannot say that I am utterly untrain’d in those rules which best Rhetori-
cians have giv’n, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of
eloquence have written in any learned tongu, yet true eloquence I find to be none,
but the serious and hearty love of truth: And that whose mind so ever is fully possest
with a fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse the
knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words... like so
many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at command, and in well order’d files,
as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places.^78Building upon this conception of rhetoric, Milton gives the most complete ac-
count yet of his poetics of satire, now equated with Godly zeal. He contrasts such
satire with Hall’s Tooth-lesse Satyrs, a title he ridicules as an oxymoronic absurdity.
Deriving satire from tragedy, Milton insists that it must “strike high, and adventure