“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660tian’s right to his own conscientious belief and practice against any would-be per-
secutors (256). He flatly denies that the magistrate is, in the usual phrase, custos
utriusque tabulae, keeper of both tablets of the Decalogue, or even of the second
tablet that deals with sins against others. Whatever power magistrates have in rela-
tion to any of the commandments, “they had from the beginning, long before
Moses or the two tables were in being” – that is, by the natural law.^119
Milton relegates magistrates firmly to the natural order, but yet allows them
some limited power to deal with certain loudly decried evils – blasphemy, idolatry,
and Roman Catholicism – on the ground that these, properly understood, can be
recognized as evils by the light of nature itself:
Let them cease then to inportune and interupt the magistrate from attending to his
own charge in civil and moral things, the settling of things just, things honest, the
defence of things religious settled by the churches within themselves; and the repress-
ing of thir contraries determinable by the common light of nature; which is not to
constrain or repress religion, probable by scripture, but the violaters and persecuters
therof. (258)This position seems strained, but Milton along with some of his contemporaries
had a rationale for it. Blasphemy Milton defines according to its Greek meaning as
“any slander, any malitious or evil speaking, whether against God or man or any
thing to good belonging” (246) – a definition that joins evil speaking against God
with the civil laws on slander and thereby brings it, as Thomas Collier also did,
within the purview of the magistrate as a matter of natural law.^120 Milton points to
parliament’s 1650 blasphemy law – chiefly targeting the Ranters – as defining blas-
phemy against God “in plane English more warily, more judiciously, more
orthodoxally” than most divines (the Westminster Assembly of divines had dictated
the sweeping blasphemy ordinance of 1648). Yet he recognizes the danger of in-
voking the term at all, as neither divines nor parliament members are “unerring
always or infallible” (246–7). Roman Catholicism is a harder case. It cannot claim
toleration on the same grounds as Protestantism, since the Catholic conscience, by
“voluntarie servitude to mans law [the pope’s definition of doctrine], forfets her
Christian libertie.” It is the only true heresy, but the magistrate cannot refuse to
tolerate Catholics on that religious ground: “if they ought not to be tolerated, it is
for just reason of state more then of religion.” However, that reason of state is not
far to seek: Catholicism is less a religion than a Roman political state seeking to
exercise universal dominion, and so is “justly therfore to be suspected, not tolerated
by the magistrate of another countrey” (254).
The strain is more pronounced in regard to idolatry, which encompasses not
only the Roman Catholic mass and icons but also Laudian liturgy and ceremony,
and links both to pagan idol-worship. Milton defines idolatry here as “an impietie”
against all scripture and quite foreign to any right conscience, whose works are “so