“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660that the clergy’s right to them was jure divino, citing Mosaic Law that awarded the
tenth to Old Testament Levites, Abraham paying tithes to the high priest
Melchizedek, and New Testament texts proclaiming ministers’ right to support.^38
Many also advanced legal and pragmatic arguments: that English law gives ministers
as good right to their tithes as landowners to their rents; that opponents of tithes
seek to level all property; that without some settled maintenance, religion and learning
cannot be spread throughout the land; and that ministers have a right to be com-
pensated for their necessary and expensive university education.^39 Many Independ-
ents were willing to consider a substitute for tithes, but they could not agree on
one.^40 Sectaries and other radicals often drew on the scholarship of John Selden to
argue that tithes pertained only to the Mosaic Law, now abrogated for Christians;
many also emphasized the sufferings inflicted on the poor by hard-hearted tithe
collectors. They rejected any kind of public maintenance on the grounds that it
compels Christians against conscience to support ministers whose teaching they
reject; that under the gospel, ministers’ support should be voluntary; and that the
magistrate has neither right nor responsibility to confirm ministers or order any
matters pertaining to the church.^41 The issue of ministers’ learning and how it was
to be acquired and paid for was inextricably linked to the tithe question. Presbyte-
rians and other conservatives insisted that the established university program of
grammar, languages, rhetoric, and divinity studies was essential for the proper inter-
pretation of scripture, since the direct revelation of the Spirit had ceased in apos-
tolic times, and even secular subjects could serve as a handmaid to religion.^42 Many
moderates held that scripture alone is sufficient to convey spiritual knowledge, that
there is danger in mixing secular learning with divine revelation, and that the Spirit
continues to reveal truth to the elect, but accepted that the original languages and
some other university subjects could be useful for ministers, and to that end often
proposed reforms in the university curriculum.^43 More radical Independents and
sectaries insisted that all human learning is entirely useless for the attainment of
spiritual knowledge, which must come only from scripture and the Spirit, but they
expected ministers would profit from certain subjects – languages and the arts of the
trivium – studied elsewhere. William Dell, master of Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge, proposed to secularize the universities, disperse colleges throughout
the land, and (anticipating Milton’s plan in The Likeliest Means) would have students
taught languages and arts and a lawful trade in reformed grammar schools, from
which God would call some to serve as ministers, “whilst yet they live in an honest
Calling and Imployment, as the Apostles did.”^44 Some extreme sectaries thought all
learning, even the original scriptural languages, to be positively detrimental to spir-
itual knowledge, since God works best through weak children and unlettered apos-
tles.^45
Milton’s preface challenges the Rump – which he addresses as “supream Senat”
- to abolish public maintenance for ministers, commending them for being “in all
things els authors, assertors, and now recovers of our libertie” (CPW VII, 274–5).