As you desire to be informed, I am, by God's mercy, as well as usual.

Of any such work as compiling the history of our political troubles, which you seem to advise, I have no thought whatever [_longe absum_]: they are worthier of silence than of commemoration.

What is needed is not one to compile a good history of our troubles, but one who can happily end the troubles themselves; for, with you, I fear lest, amid these our civil discords, or rather sheer madnesses, we shall seem to the lately confederated enemies of Liberty and Religion a too fit object of attack, though in truth they have not yet inflicted a severer wound on Religion than we ourselves have been long doing by our crimes.

But God, as I hope, on His own account, and for His own glory, now in question, will not allow the counsels and onsets of the enemy to succeed as they themselves wish, whatever convulsions Kings and Cardinals meditate and design.

Meanwhile, for the Protestant Synod of Loudun, which you tell me is so soon to meet [Milton does not seem to know that it had been sitting already for six weeks] I pray--what has never happened to any Synod yet--a happy issue, not of the Nazianzenian sort,[1] and am of opinion that the issue of this one will be happy enough if, should they decree nothing else, they should decree the expulsion of Morus.