“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665his antitithe arguments from The Likeliest Means: to “exact tithes or gospel-taxes”
by force or the power of the magistrate is the action of wolves and it does not take
place “in any reformed church except ours.”^166 Ideally, ministers should serve with-
out pay, living off their own resources or working at “some trade or some respect-
able profession” (599); otherwise, they should rely on voluntary contributions from
their own churches. Chapter 32 describes church discipline – counselling the weak,
composing differences among members, and sometimes ejecting sinners – as a spir-
itual power to be exercised only by a particular church over its own members’
inner faculties; it stands in direct contrast to the magistrate’s civil power over the
bodies of all citizens.^167 Milton’s description of church meetings suggests something
like Quaker practice; he may have attended some Quaker meetings at Chalfont
with his friend Ellwood, or at least liked what he was told about them:
One man, and he with motives of gain, should not be struck up in a pulpit and have
the sole right of addressing the congregation. Instead each believer, according to his
personal talents, should have a chance to address his fellows, or to prophesy, teach, or
exhort. Even the weakest of the brethren should have an opportunity to interrogate
or to ask advice from the older and more learned of those present. (608)Unlike the Quakers, however, Milton retains the Pauline prohibition against women
speaking in church (609).
Book 1 concludes with a largely conventional account of last things and the
glorification of those who believe and persevere. In the early 1640s Milton had
been at times caught up in the widespread millenarian fervor, but he no longer
expects apocalypse soon: Christ, he now says, “will be slow to come” (618). That
second coming will inaugurate a scenario like that extracted by Joseph Mede and
many others from the Book of Revelation, in which Christ’s judgment of the
world is coextensive with his thousand-year reign on earth with his saints.^168 That
concept allowed Milton in his political tracts to project the Millennium as a refer-
ence point for the contemporary political order, which ought to be in preparation
for that moment however near or far distant, not by Fifth Monarchist uprisings or
theocratic government, but by rejecting idolatry and kingship, disestablishing the
church, and promoting religious and intellectual liberty. After that thousand-year
reign Satan will mount a last battle against the church, Christ will finally defeat
Satan, and then will come the Last Judgment of the rebel angels and all humankind,
each “according to the light which he has received” (623–5). The damned will be
sent to hell to endure the “second death” of eternal punishment graduated accord-
ing to their sins; and the saved will enjoy, also in unequal measure, an “eternal and
utterly happy life, arising chiefly from the sight of God” and enhanced by the
possession of heaven and earth and “all those creatures in both which may be useful
or delightful” (630–2).
Book 2, ‘Of Good Works,” is often close in language, though not in overall