Making Law and Recording It: Part I

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Selden’s contribution to the struggle to define the reach of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the mid-1640s, as Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly of Divines fought to have the power to exclude the “ignorant” and “scandalous” from communion. For Selden, the issue of excommunication turned—as it had in his handling of the topic of an ecclesiastical right to tithes—on the question of whether the clergy’s authority was God-given or man-made. The final section of the chapter suggests that Milton’s position on excommunication can only be indirectly inferred from his writings—in particular from his poem “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” which explicitly attacks the Assembly on plurality and the grouping of English churches in classes. Selden acknowledged that the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise might be construed as an “excommunication,” a cursing or anathemata. But Milton, who would become the great English poet of exile, failed to take the imaginative leap that would connect exile with excommunication.