Excerpt:
Milton, then, was not merely a hired pen of the Republic but its principled supporter. He began his service believing in the possibility that, in the Commonwealth, he was helping to build God’s kingdom on earth. Yet, over the course of his many years’ unflinching service to the Republic and subsequently to Oliver Cromwell as its Lord Protector, Milton’s optimism drained out of him slowly but surely like sap from an injured tree. In 1641, as Christopher Hill points out, Milton was full of millenarian hope and wrote of Christ’s return in terms of a ‘shortly expected king’.

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Music is Rise Up, O Lord, a recording of Psalm 10 by My Soul Among Lions.