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Updated: May 7, 2025
The Act which more seriously touched Bunyan was that of May 2, 1648, which enacts that any person saying, 'that man is bound to believe no more than by his reason he can comprehend, or that the baptizing of infants is unlawful, or such baptism is void, and that such persons ought to be baptized again, and, in pursuance thereof, shall baptize any person formerly baptized, shall be imprisoned until he gives security that he will not publish or maintain the said error any more. It was these intolerant proceedings that led Milton to publish a poem On the New Forcers of Conscience, beginning with these lines
Of the twenty-four sonnets indeed twenty-four, reckoning the twenty-lined piece, "The forcers of conscience," as a sonnet eleven belong to this period. But they do not form a continuous series, such as do Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, nor do they evince a sustained mood of poetical meditation.
Here is mirrors and combs, scissors and knives, necklaces, beads and girdles, purses of Rouen, forcers and gipsers all manner you can wish. Relics I have, if you desire dem a little finger-bone of Saint George, and a tooth of de dragon dat he slew; a t'read of de veil of Saint Agat'a, and de paring of Saint Matthew's nails.
Since the removal from the Aldersgate Street house to that in Barbican, Milton, as we know, had ceased from prose pamphleteering; and all that he had done of a literary kind, besides publishing his volume of collected Poems, had been his two Divorce Sonnets, his Sonnet to Henry Lawes, and his Sonnet with the scorpion tail, entitled On the Forcers of Conscience.
"Under force, though no thank to the forcers, true religion ofttimes best thrives and flourishes; but the corruption of teachers, most commonly the effect of hire, is the very bane of truth in them who are so corrupted." Nor can we tax this aversion to a salaried ministry, with being a monomania of sect.
As Milton had already, in his Colasterion, said enough about Prynne and the heavy margins of his many pamphlets, and as the circumstances in which Prynne had lost his ears made the subject hardly a proper one for a public joke, it was but good taste in Milton to make the change. The draft of it among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge has the simpler title On the Forcers of Conscience.
The withering lines are familiar to us, in which Milton denounces the "New Forcers of Conscience," who by their intolerance and "super-metropolitan and hyperarchiepiscopal tyranny," proved that in his proverbial words, "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large"
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