and expressed in the plainest language his contempt for the infallibility of councils and universal belief as a test of truth,—"human authority at the strongest is but weak, but the multitude is the weakest part of human authority"; while in his tract on Schism and Schismatics, which was not to the taste of Laud (though Hales's explanations or qualifications were accepted as satisfactory), he was equally blunt as to the authority of the Church, "which is none."
These friends of Lord Falkland were the heralds of later toleration and the appeal to reason and reason only, and their plain clear style was the reflection of their thought. The controversy between Anglicanism and Romanism, appealing not only to Controversy—
Milton. Scripture but to history and the Fathers, overshadowed during the whole of James's and the first part of Charles's reign the conflict with Puritanism. That conflict was carried on with other weapons than the pen; and it was not till the Long Parliament met that the Marprelate controversy was renewed in fiercer tones than under Elizabeth, and that the Anglican Church awoke to the fact that her most serious antagonist was not Rome. From the mass of pamphlets which began to pour from the press after 1640, Hall's Humble Remonstrance in Favour of Episcopacy (1640) and Jeremy Taylor's Episcopacy Asserted (1643) are still known, at any rate, by name; but the most famous are those on which Milton [1] set the
- ↑ Prose Works, ed. Toland, 1698; rep. 1738 and 1753; ed. Symons, 1806, Fletcher, 1833, Mitford, 1851. St John, 4 vols., Lond., 1848-53. The Areopagitica has been frequently edited separately, and the Tractate of Education also.
