Little
known to the great world outside of his poems, there is one prose work,
discovered only in 1823, which has been less read, but which contains the
articles of his Christian belief. It is a tractate on Christian doctrine:
no one now doubts its genuineness; and it proves him to have been a
Unitarian, or High Arian, by his own confession. This was somewhat
startling to the great orthodox world, who had taken many of their
conceptions of supernatural things from Milton's _Paradise Lost_; and yet
a careful study of that poem will disclose similar tendencies in the
poet's mind. He was a Puritan whose theology was progressive until it
issued in complete isolation: he left the Presbyterian ranks for the
Independents, and then, startled by the rise and number of sects, he
retired within himself and stood almost alone, too proud to be instructed,
and dissatisfied with the doctrines and excesses of his earlier
colleagues.
In 1653 he lost his wife, Mary Powell, who left him three daughters. He
supplied her place in 1656, by marrying Catherine Woodstock, to whom he
was greatly attached, and who also died fifteen months after.
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