What Milton and the American Founders have in common is this: they were early and vigorous proponents of the very ideas that would later be used to denounce them. They opened a door that they chose not to walk through—but they opened it. As the English historian C. V. Wedgwood wrote in the introduction to her great history of the English Civil War, “The highest ideals put forth in this generation of conflict were noble; the men who fought or worked for them were less noble than the ideals, for the best of men do not consistently live on the highest plane of virtue, and most men live far below
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