“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660Now as then Milton has little understanding of and less sympathy for poor boys
without family resources who seek to become ministers, and thereby gentlemen,
but who are unable or unwilling to fit themselves for it by arduous intellectual
labor.
Yet Milton defines the ministry in terms as egalitarian as those of any radical
sectary: since the minister’s only necessary knowledge and calling is from above,
ministers may be elected by their congregations “out of all sorts and orders of men,
for the Gospel makes no difference from the magistrate himself to the meanest
artificer, if God evidently favor him with spiritual gifts, as he can easily and oft hath
don” (319). For ministers and flock alike the means of attaining to spiritual knowl-
edge is exactly the same: the study of scripture and the Spirit’s illumination. The
apostles were unlearned men; the first reformers (the Waldensians) were known as
the poor men of Lyons; the scriptures are now translated into the vulgar tongue “as
being held in main matters of belief and salvation, plane and easie to the poorest.”^123
He even defends the artisan and tradesmen tub-preachers. Though our ministers
think them “the reproach of this age.... It were to be wishd they were all trades-
men; they would not then... make a trade of thir preaching” (306). His proposals
for the support of the clergy flow from these attitudes. Ministers should be sup-
ported by the voluntary contribution of the churches they serve; if those churches
cannot provide an adequate subsistence, ministers should live on their own re-
sources (as sons of the gentry might be able to do) or else support themselves by a
trade as the apostles did. To plant new churches in neglected areas he proposes
(again on the model of the apostles) that itinerant preachers teach for a time in a
given area, then appoint elders to carry on “all ministerial offices” in the fledgling
church. They might meet in church or chapel or (like the Quakers) in a house or
barn: “he who disdaind not to be laid in a manger, disdains not to be preachd in a
barn” (304). This missionary activity would be best funded by the charity of estab-
lished churches, but the magistrate might also contribute, using revenues anciently
given to the (then popish) church for superstitious purposes. This blurs somewhat
Milton’s divide between the civil and religious spheres, but he specifies that the
magistrate may only dispense revenues to these purposes that had belonged to the
church, applying them to such purposes as the churches themselves “or solid reason
from whomsoever shall convince him to think best” (305).
Milton’s own “solid reason” leads him to propose that the magistrate fund “schooles
and competent libraries to those schooles, where languages and arts may be taught
free together, without the needles, unprofitable and inconvenient removing to an-
other place” (305). He probably assumes that such schools would teach lower-class
boys generally, though only some of them would receive God’s call to the minis-
try.^124 But for the rhetorical purposes of this tract he focuses on how such schools
might produce ministers with a competence of learning and an honest trade, ex-
pecting that they then would not “gadd for preferment out of thir own countrey,
but continue there thankful for what they receivd freely... without soaring above