“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642have the instructing and disciplining of Gods people by whose full and free Election
they are consecrated to that holy and equall Aristocracy. And why should not the Piety,
and Conscience of Englishmen as members of the Church be trusted in the election of
Pastors... as well as their worldly wisedomes are priviledg’d as members of the State in
suffraging their Knights, and Burgesses.^91According to this Miltonic ideal, a “free, and untutor’d Monarch” – presumably one
not under the thumb of Strafford or Laud or a privy council – is head of both
church and state; the people freely elect both parliamentary representatives and
ministers; and the “supreme” civil and spiritual power is explicitly located in the
“Aristocratic” element – the elected parliament of “noblest, worthiest, and most
prudent men,” and the proposed elected ministry.
But Milton’s most telling arguments are conveyed in poetic and rhetorical terms,
through pervasive imagery of the body and of monstrous generation. He unleashes
a torrent of repulsive images calculated to elicit readers’ revulsion, even as they
reveal his own, passionate disgust for prelates who, he declares, have for centuries
served their own bellies and wielded power over the people’s consciences and
bodies (579), making the people’s relation to God one of “thral-like feare” and
“Servile crouching” (522). Ministers raised to a bishopric soon “exhale and reake
out” most of their zeale and gifts, producing a “queazy temper of luke-warmnesse
that gives a Vomit to God himselfe” (536–7). The institution of episcopacy is “an
universall rottennes, and gangrene” in the church; and the Laudian liturgy, instead
of being “purg’d, and Physick’t,” was given into the control of prelates “belching
the soure Crudities of yesterdayes Poperie” (540). Far from descending legitimately
from the church Fathers, prelacy and the Laudian liturgy are monsters and breeders
of monsters:
The soure levin of humane Traditions mixt in one putrifi’d Masse with the poisonous
dregs of hypocrisie in the hearts of Prelates that lye basking in the Sunny warmth of
Wealth, and Promotion, is the Serpents Egge that will hatch an Antichrist wheresoever,
and ingender the same Monster as big, or little as the Lump is which breeds him.^92Also, Milton develops a striking body–state analogy directly opposed to that
conveyed by the frontispiece in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). The commonwealth,
Milton declares, ought to be “as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth,
and stature of an honest man, as big, and compact in vertue as in body,” but mod-
ern politicans seek only “how to keep up the floting carcas of a crazie, and diseased
Monarchy” (572). Elaborating this analogy, Milton constructs a fable that revises
the familiar story of the body politic in Livy, and recasts the usual allegorical
equivalences in quasi-republican terms.^93 In Milton’s version, “the Body summon’d
all the Members to meet in the Guild for the common good”: that is, the state as a
whole, not the king as head, summons its representatives to parliament. In most