“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665controlling design, he supplies connectives at the beginnings of several chapters to
point up the rationale of his organization.^93
In his Epistle, Milton seeks to forestall resistance to his heterodox or extreme
opinions by a rhetoric that lays open the profound personal convictions upon which
they rest. For one thing, the belief that God’s revelations (like poetic inspiration)
come to those who do all they can for themselves by way of study and preparation:
“In religion as in other things, I discerned, God offers all his rewards not to those
who are thoughtless and credulous, but to those who labor constantly and seek
tirelessly after truth.”^94 For another, the belief (so vigorously argued in Areopagitica)
in ongoing divine revelation and the good of free discussion: “I implore all friends
of truth not to start shouting that the church is being thrown into confusion by free
discussion and inquiry... the daily increase of the light of truth fills the church
much rather with brightness and strength than with confusion.”^95 For yet another,
the claim of original scholarship, familiar from the divorce tracts, coupled with the
assertion, also urged in Of Civil Power, that no doctrine, however far removed from
“certain conventional opinions,” can be heresy, if it is argued from scripture:
I devote my attention to the Holy Scriptures alone. I follow no other heresy or sect.
I had not even studied any of the so-called heretical writers, when the blunders of
those who are styled orthodox, and their unthinking distortions of the sense of scrip-
ture, first taught me to agree with their opponents whenever these agreed with the
Bible. If this be heresy, I confess, as does Paul in Acts xxiv.14, that following the way
which is called heresy I worship the God of my fathers, believing all things that are written in the
law and the prophets and, I add, whatever is written in the New Testament as well.^96This last assumption, he explains, dictates his method in this treatise: while most
theological manuals relegate biblical proof texts to the margins, he has sought “to
cram my pages even to overflowing, with quotations drawn from all parts of the
Bible,” leaving “as little space as possible for my own words” (122). While that last
claim is not strictly true, Milton does urge his readers to follow, not his opinions as
such, but his example in weighing the biblical evidence:
I do not urge or enforce anything upon my own authority. On the contrary, I advise
every reader, and set him an example by doing the same thing myself, to withhold his
consent from those opinions about which he does not feel fully convinced, until the
evidence of the Bible convinces him and induces his reason to assent and to believe.
(121–2)He still hopes, though without the soaring confidence of Areopagitica, that reason
and truth, given a fair hearing, will prevail.
Milton follows Wolleb, Ames, and several others in organizing the two books of
his treatise after the two parts of Christian doctrine they identify. In chapter 1 he
defines Christian doctrine as the doctrine Christ taught for God’s glory and man’s