It might have been said of Milton in the literal sense.

The idealist was about to apply his principles of church polity to family life, to the horror of many nominal allies.

His treatise on Divorce was the next of his publications in chronological order, but is so entwined with his domestic life that it will be best to postpone it until we again take up the thread of his personal history, and to pass on for the present to his next considerable writings, his tracts on education and on the freedom of the press.
Milton's tract on Education, like so many of his performances, was the fruit of an impulse from without.

"Though it be one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for want of which this nation perishes, I had not at this time been induced but by your earnest entreaties and serious conjurements." The efficient cause thus referred to existed in the person of Samuel Hartlib, philanthropist and polypragmatist, precursor of the Franklins and Rumfords of the succeeding century.

The son of a Polish exile of German extraction, Hartlib had settled in England about 1627.