“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665which he once sacrificed himself for sinners and continues to intercede for human-
kind. The kingly office, devolved upon him by the Father, involves ruling and
preserving his church “by internal law and spiritual power” and conquering his
enemies. As he did in Of Civil Power, Milton draws a sharp distinction between
Christ’s rule over conscience and the magistrate’s use of physical force in civil mat-
ters, insisting that “external force should never be used in Christ’s kingdom, the
Church.”^152 Chapter 16 treats Christ’s exercise of his mediatorial office as a func-
tion of both his natures. Contesting the orthodox view that Christ’s divine nature
was not subject to suffering and death and that he rose from the dead by his own
divine power, Milton asserts that he endured all the aspects of his humiliation –
birth, circumcision, baptism, temptation, and even his Passion and death – in his
whole person: “If his divine nature was not suffering too, why was it not there to
help him when he cried out?” Also, since the whole of a sacrifice must be killed, “it
follows that Christ, the sacrificial lamb, was totally killed.”^153
Milton’s analysis of the renovation of humankind by grace (chapters 17–21) is
influenced by his version of Arminianism. Whereas Ames and many other Protes-
tants began with Justification, the action of grace by which Christ’s merits are sub-
stituted for man’s sins, Milton takes up first the actual or internal renovation of
believers. The first stage, Vocation, he defines as God’s general call offered to all
humankind, accompanied by sufficient grace to enlighten the mind and renew the
will, at least partly (457). All are called and empowered to respond, though some
may be called “more clearly and more insistently” than others, or to special mis-
sions (455). If answered, this call elicits penitence and faith, which may be tempo-
rary and natural or may lead on to Regeneration (chapter 18), which Milton like
most Protestants describes as the restoration of the inner man to the image of God,
marked by “righteousness and true holiness” and by an enlightened intellect and
liberated will, “as if he were a new creature.” But he adjusts these formulas to his
own beliefs: Regeneration (also called Sanctification) is through Christ but is “by
God the Father”; most references to the Spirit in this connection are to “the divine
virtue of the Father”; and even the new creature can fall from grace (461–4). In
chapter 19 Milton describes the several degrees and stages of repentance – recogni-
tion of sin, contrition, confession, abandonment of evil, and conversion to good –
affirming against many theologians that it precedes saving faith rather than follows
it.^154 Contrasting saving faith to historical or implicit or temporary faith, he defines
it as a firm persuasion “implanted in us by the gift of God... that all those things
which God has promised us in Christ are ours, and especially the grace of eternal
life” (471). Insisting against many of the orthodox that the object of faith is “not
Christ, the Mediator, but God the Father,” Milton concludes that “there are a lot
of Jews, and Gentiles too, who are saved although they believed or believe in God
alone” (475). A further stage, Ingrafting in Christ (chapter 21), brings about the
restoration of the intellect “to a very large extent... to its former state of enlight-
enment” and of the will “to its former freedom,” producing a larger understanding