In the following August appeared a sequel with the sarcastic title, "Considerations on the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church." The recipe is simple and efficacious--cease to hire them, and they will cease to be hirelings.

Suppress all ecclesiastical endowments, and let the clergyman be supported by free-will offerings.

The fact that this would have consigned about half the established clergy to beggary does not trouble him; nor were they likely to be greatly troubled by a proposal so sublimely impracticable.

Vested interests can only be over-ridden in times of revolution, and 1659, in outward appearance a year of anarchy, was in truth a year of reaction.

For the rest, it is to be remarked that Milton scarcely allowed the ministry to be followed as a profession, and that his views on ecclesiastical organization had come to coincide very nearly with those now held by the Plymouth Brethren.
There is much plausibility in Pattison's comparison of the men of the Commonwealth disputing about matters of this sort on the eve of the Restoration, to the Greeks of Constantinople contending about the Azymite controversy while the Turks were breaching their walls.