“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665God.^172 Convicting of bad faith those who have misused and mystified the term so
as to comprehend within it “pretty well any opinion about God or religious matters
which did not tally with their own,” he carefully excludes from that category all
doctrines argued from scripture (such as his own Arianism): “Those who, in all
sincerity, and with no desire to stir up controversy, teach or discuss some doctrine
concerning the deity which they have quite apparently, as they see it, learned from
the Holy Scriptures, are in no sense guilty of the sin of blasphemy” (699–700). As
to the circumstances of divine worship, time and place, he challenges the assertion
of “our countryman, Ames” that the reasons for keeping the Sabbath are “moral
and immutable,” referring back to his earlier discussions of prelapsarian Eden and
Christian liberty: “we who live under the gospel and are, as I proved in my first
book, quite freed from the law, must be emancipated above all from this law about
Sabbath-observance,” which pertained to the Israelites alone.^173 The church may
designate a day for voluntary public observance but it must not be enforced by civil
or ecclesiastical authority (714).
Identifying charity and justice as the comprehensive virtues determining our
duties toward ourselves and others, Milton focuses first (chapters 8–10) on the self,
often drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, though he cites only scripture texts. Charity
seeks our own temporal and eternal good, and justice mandates self-government
and control of the affections: love, hate, joy, sadness, hope, fear, and anger. Tem-
perance, which involves sobriety, chastity, modesty, and decency, regulates desire
for the pleasures of the flesh; he describes sins against chastity – “voluptuousness,
sodomy, bestiality and so on” – as he has from the time of Prolusion VI as degrada-
tions of oneself (726–7). In discussing the virtues regulating appetites for material
possessions – contentment, frugality, industry – Milton revealingly includes elegance
(“lautitia”), defined as “the discriminating enjoyment of food, clothing and all the
civilized refinements of life, purchased with our honest earnings”; his early biogra-
phers reported that he ate and drank sparingly but liked what he had to be of the
best.^174 Among the virtues regulating attitudes toward honors or distinctions, Milton
includes humility, defining it – with a characteristic and revealing exception – as
the virtue which “gives a man a modest opinion of himself and prevents him from
blowing his own trumpet, except when it is really called-for” (733). He also in-
cludes high-mindedness (“Magnanimitas”), manifested when, in seeking, accept-
ing, or avoiding riches, advantages, or honors, “a man behaves himself as befits his
own dignity, rightly understood” (735); the definition looks back to Aristotle (Eth-
ics IV, ii) and forward to Paradise Regained (2.463–83). The virtues needed for repel-
ling evils Milton identifies, as he did in Of Education, as fortitude and patience,
opposing the latter to the apathy of the Stoics, as he will again in Paradise Re-
gained.^175
Milton’s treatment of the virtues and vices relating to one’s neighbor (chapters
11–14) remains close to Wollebius. He defines neighbor as “anyone to whom our
kindness or help is opportune,” but recognizes the special claims of fellow Chris-