Even more; "having a curious ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read and when I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult passages to me." Milton must have felt a special tenderness for the Quakers, whose religious opinions, divested of the shell of eccentricity which the vulgar have always mistaken for the kernel, had become substantially his own.

He had outgrown Independency as formerly Presbyterianism.

His blindness served to excuse his absence from public worship; to which, so long at least as Clarendon's intolerance prevailed in the councils of Charles the Second, might be added the difficulty of finding edification in the pulpit, had he needed it.

But these reasons, though not imaginary, were not those which really actuated him.

He had ceased to value rites and forms of any kind, and, had his religious views been known, he would have been "equalled in fate" with his contemporary Spinoza.