Excerpt from Selected Prose Writings of John Milton: With an Introductory Essay In a time of revolution, and with the main elements of that revolution he warmly sympathized. But how far can the forces then at work be said to have found expression in his writings? He tells us that the principle for which he strove was the threefold principle of civil, domestic, and religious liberty. This is hardly the principle avowed by the leaders of the Parliaments of 1628 and 1629, or even of the Long Parliament. Until the Independents became a power, Presbyterianism represented Puritanism, and was more intolerant than Anglicanism. In the Grand Remonstrance it is the suppression of inno vations that is spoken of as the object of the address. In Church matters the Parliament hold it requisite that there should be throughout the whole realm conformity to that order which the laws enjoin 'according to the word of God.' Though it was barely a century since the establishment of the Reformation in England, most Englishmen looked on returns to Papish practices as innovations, and Parliament appealed to the conservative feeling of the English race against these, without misgiving as to the need of innovating to other purposes. Milton's Areopagitica, ' written in 1644, is a demand for liberty for innovations to approve them selves if they can, though he too always regarded the Roman Church as rendering exceptional pre cautions needful. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.