“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674an outward conformity.^14 The vociferous counterarguments by, among others,
Thomas Tomkyns, urge enforced attendance at Anglican services to produce unity:
Uniformity if it were carefully maintained, and diligently looked after, would in a few
years recall our Ancient Unity; The People would quickly forget all these fantasies.... We should quickly see, that the People would come to the Churches, if there
were not so many Conventicles to keep them thence; and if they were but used for a
little while to come thither, they would not find the Liturgy to be such a fearful idol
as they have been often told of.^15
Efforts to secure some toleration for dissenters were supported by Charles and the
Catholic and crypto-Catholic peers, in the interest, ultimately, of relieving Catho-
lics.^16 But the fiercely Anglican parliament, whenever it convened, quashed all such
gestures and forced Charles II to sign an even more stringent Conventicles Act just
a few months before Milton’s volume was licensed.
Milton’s two poems offer two models of political response in conditions of severe
trial and oppression. Both poems are fundamentally concerned with education: moral,
political, and spiritual. Both contain adumbrations of the Apocalypse, foreshadowed
as some thought by the Great Plague and Great Fire; but Milton’s poems place that
event far off, and are concerned with how to live now and prepare rightly for it.
Paradise Regained offers in Jesus a model of unflinching resistance to and forthright
denunciation of all versions of the sinful or disordered life, and all faulty and false
models of church and state. Jesus takes as his immediate kingly role “to guide Nations
in the way of truth” (PR 2.473), insisting that it would be futile to free the “unrepent-
ant, unreform’d” Israelites (or Englishmen) who worship idols along with God. But
he holds out the Millennial hope that God “by some wond’rous call / May bring
them back repentant and sincere, /... to their native land” (3.426–37). And he
prophesies that in that apocalypse his monarchy, like a stone, “shall to pieces dash / All
Monarchies besides throughout the world” (4.149–50). As one analogue for that model
of resistance David Loewenstein points to contemporary Quakers, the Nonconform-
ist group who were most severely persecuted by the establishment and who denounced
it insistently in testimony and tracts.^17 Milton’s Quaker friends, notably the Isaac
Pennington family and Thomas Ellwood, were often subjected to inquisition and
imprisonment.^18 Alternatively, Samson Agonistes presents a warrior hero through whose
catastrophic act God offered his people a second chance to free themselves from igno-
minious defeat and slavery, though only after Samson undergoes a searching and pain-
ful process of self-analysis, repentance, and new understanding. Israel’s freedom,
however, depends on whether the community, this time, can seize the Machiavellian
occasione. Both works dramatize, in different ways, Milton’s characteristic stance in the
prose tracts: that the attainment of liberty, the exercise of governance, and indeed any
worthy action in the service of God and country are predicated on virtue, sound
moral and political understanding, and openness to divine illumination.