The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography

“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642

chapters to engaging the tracts of Bishops Hall and Ussher,^95 and otherwise makes a
broad argument against episcopacy and (ostensibly) for the Presbyterian model as
the church government mandated by scripture. But what he describes is a more
nearly ideal church order based on the spirit of the gospel, the concept of reason,
the nature of discipline, and the equality of clergy and laity. The “Reason” of the
title has seemed to some a misnomer, since Milton does not build a closely reasoned
argument from the usual scripture proof texts, and also seems to set the authority of
scripture against human reason:

Let them chaunt while they will of prerogatives, we shall tell them of Scripture; of

custom, we of Scripture; of Acts and Statutes, stil of Scripture, til the quick and

pearcing word enter to the dividing of their soules, & the mighty weaknes of the

Gospel throw down the weak mightines of mans reasoning.^96

But in Milton’s terms the title is apt, since his project is to make manifest God’s
reasons for the church government laid down in scripture, reasons not there stated
“because to him that heeds attentively the drift and scope of Christian profession,
they easily imply themselves” (CPW I, 750). This is an appeal to the entire scope or
spirit of the gospel to clarify the divine rationale left implicit in particular texts.
Book I focuses on what Milton sees as the essence of church government, the
right ordering or “discipline” of individual members. Pointing to the universal
need for discipline – “there is not that thing in the world of more grave and urgent
importance throughout the whole life of man, then is discipline” (751) – he con-
cludes that God as father of his family the church must have provided a discipline
for “training it up under his owne all-wise and dear Oeconomy.”^97 He cites several
texts from Titus and Timothy and the precedent of the Old Testament Temple
worship to argue this conclusion, but he flatly denies that the Old Testament can
offer any kind of model for New Testament church government. The reason, again,
is the spirit of the gospel:

That the Gospell is the end and fulfilling of the Law, our liberty also from the bondage

of the Law I plainly reade. How then the ripe age of the Gospell should be put to

schoole againe, and learn to governe her selfe from the infancy of the Law, the stronger

to imitate the weaker, the freeman to follow the captive, the learned to be lesson’d by

the rude, will be a hard undertaking to evince. (763)

To counter the bishops’ claim that episcopacy developed over time as a sanctioned
means to counter schism, Milton castigates prelacy as itself the chief promoter of
schism. It divides English Protestants from reformed churches abroad, it has forced
many into separation and exile, and it has affixed sectarian labels on good Chris-
tians, first terming them “Lollards and Hussites” and now “Puritans, and Brownists

... Familists and Adamites, or worse” (788). But Presbyterians as well as prelates