“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660the meannes wherin they were born” (305). This proposal indicates Milton’s as-
sumption, shared with some other radical Independents, that while human learning
is in no way necessary for ministers, they will find some of it useful. He seems to
distinguish between the subject matter – ideas, concepts, insights, and information
- which is irrelevant to a minister’s function, and the methods or tools which are
helpful in explicating scripture. None of the learning that strictly pertains to the
minister’s role requires university training: they might better be “traind up in the
church only, by the scripture and in the original languages [and presumably in the
arts of textual analysis] therof at school” (317). Such helps as sermons, notes, com-
mentaries on the Bible, marrows of divinity, and the like can be had in English
translations and studied “in any private house” and a minister’s “needful library” of
such works would cost only about £60. Whatever else might be helpful in other
arts and sciences “they can well learn at secondary leisure and at home”(316–18).
Anything beyond this is for the minister’s own “curiositie or delight” as an edu-
cated man, not for his training or function as a minister. As for controversialists, the
state might meet their needs by erecting “in publick good store of libraries” where
men “of their own inclinations will become able in this kinde against Papist or any
other adversarie” (317). Milton implies by this that serious scholars can and should,
as he did, pursue their studies at home or in libraries, and employ them voluntarily
in the service of the church.
In Of Education Milton denounced an “ignorantly zealous divinity” defrauded by
the universities of knowledge useful to their calling (II, 375); now he firmly be-
lieves that a minister can do God’s work in a good and sufficient manner without
any reliance on human learning, though (unlike the extreme radicals) he assumes
the utility of some tools of learning and suggests means for their acquisition. What
drives his analysis is not empathy for the tub-preachers but a desire to collapse
entirely all distinctions between clergy and laity, to claim for himself and all the
faithful of every class their gospel right as “a holy and a royal priesthood”(319), who
ought to take full responsibility for their own religious knowledge and practice:
Christendom might soone... be happie, if Christians would but know thir own
dignitie, thir libertie, thir adoption, and let it not be wonderd if I say, thir spiritual
priesthood, whereby they have all equally access to any ministerial function whenever
calld by thir own abilities and the church, though they never came neer commence-
ment or universitie. (320)Milton the erstwhile aspiring minister, who almost two decades before declared
himself “church-outed” by the prelates, is now ready to appropriate any and all
ministerial functions to all worthy Christians like himself.
The second edition of The Readie & Easie Way, almost twice the length of the
first edition and published only days before the Restoration, was Milton’s last op-
portunity to marshal support for the republic. In the body of the tract he makes