Defensio Secunda - Tract

Tract

Milton begins his work by addressing claiming to fight for truth and freedom who will help reform Europe:

"I have in the First Defence spoken out and shall in the Second speak again to the entire assembly and council of all the most influential men, cities, and nations everywhere".

He continues by discussing parts of his life, and explains why he writes instead of fighting as a soldier:

"I did not avoid the toils and dangers of military service without rendering to my fellow citizens another kind of service that was much more useful and no less perilous".

After defending why he writes, Milton explains his purpose in writing:

It is the renewed cultivation of freedom and civic life that I disseminate throughout cities, kingdoms, and nations. But not entirely unknown, nor perhaps unwelcome, shall I return if I am he who disposed of the contentious satellite of tyrants, hitherto deemed unconquerable, both in the view of most men and in his own opinion. When he with insults was attacking us and our battle array, and our leaders looked first of all to me, I met him in single combat and plunged into his reviling throat this pen, the weapon of his choice.

After Milton was accused of being a worse person than Cromwell, he wrote in the work that it was "the highest praise you could bestow on me". Later in the tract, Milton discusses his Areopagitica and argues that in the work, he warns against the idea of truth being determined by a limited few. Milton also discusses his early divorce tracts, claiming that they were a discussion of religious freedom, domestic freedom, and civil freedom, the "three varieties of liberty without which civilized life is scarcely possible".