“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652Milton answers the charges of Ormond and the Presbyters that the English have
abandoned true religion and are promoting irreligion, blasphemy, paganism, and
atheism by the countercharge that, by supporting the papist antichrist in Ireland,
Charles and Ormond are themselves the most dangerous subverters of religion and
upholders of blasphemy: “What more blasphemous not opinion but whole Reli-
gion then Popery, plung’d into Idolatrous and Ceremoniall Superstition, the very
death of all true Religion” (316). By contrast, the English parliament “have every
where brok’n their Temporall power, thrown down their public Superstitions, and
confin’d them to the bare enjoyment of that which is not in our reach, their Con-
sciences” (309). The republic also supports “all true Ministers of the Gospel” as
they preach and exercise spiritual discipline – the only means of advancing true
religion that Christ sanctions. He also intends such comments as advice to the new
republic to hold out against Presbyterian pressures to enforce orthodoxy: the civil
sword, Milton insists, must act only against “Civill offenses.” He allows some ex-
ceptions to this formula, but hedges them about with qualifications. The magistrate
may suppress the open practice of Roman Catholicism as the fountainhead of idolatry
and therein subversive of all religion and liberty. As for “declar’d atheists” and
“malicious enemies of God, and of Christ,” he observes that “Parlament... pro-
fesses not to tolerate such, but with all befitting endeavours to suppresse them”
(311). However, he does not identity himself with that formula from the recent
Blasphemy Act, nor does he indicate what, if any, punishment he envisages for
them or for the idolatrous papists. Instead, he warns that such epithets are often
dangerously misapplied, for example by royalists to the Presbyterians who began
the rebellion and to the regicide members of the present government.^30 He brands
as an “audacious calumny” the charge that the English embrace “Paganism and
Judaism in the arms of toleration,” but insists that “while we detest Judaism, we know
our selves commanded by St. Paul, Rom. 11 [11:18] to respect the Jews, and by all
means to endeavor thir conversion” (326) – perhaps suggesting agreement with the
proposal of some Independents to invite the Jews back to England.^31 He also advises
his government that the Covenant does not require settling Presbyterianism through-
out England, but only where it is desired:
As we perceave it [Presbyterianism] aspiring to be a compulsive power upon all with-
out exception... or to require the fleshly arm of Magistracy in the execution of a
spirituall Discipline, to punish and amerce by any corporall infliction those whose
consciences cannot be edifi’d... we hold it no more to be the hedg and bulwark of
Religion, then the Popish and Prelaticall Courts, or the Spanish Inquisition. (326)Noting that the Commonwealth is continuing ministers’ stipends, he refrains from
stating his opposition to that arrangement, but he does observe, hopefully, that
“they think not money or Stipend to be the best encouragement of a true Pastor,”
and he reminds them that the Donation of Constantine was the beginning of the