Themes
Milton opposed the concept of the establishment of a central Church government. He believed that individual congregations should govern themselves. His view of how bishops would burn in hell is connected to themes originating in is poem On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. According to C. A. Patrides, it "combines a serene assurance that an appeal to reason would prove decisive, with an apocalyptic persuasion that the Primal Reason could hardly fail to intervene on behalf of so just a cause as Milton's."
Parts of Of Reformation emphasize a conflict present within Milton: he believed that the act of writing the work would take away from the spiritual connection between an individual and God. The physicality of writing interferes with the soul, and that any appeal would be to the physical senses and possibly not to the spiritual. In essence, the church is corrupted whore who "out of question from her pervers conceiting of God, and holy things, she has faln to beleeve no God at all.
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Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
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“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
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