“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665mined number of other amanuenses, between the lines, in large margins evidently
left for that purpose, and in substituted leaves. Probably before Milton’s death a
young acquaintance, Daniel Skinner, began the preparation of another fair copy; he
recopied the first 196 pages comprising chapters 1–14, and also pages 571–4. These
sections contain the most heterodox arguments and were no doubt heavily re-
vised.^82 Milton’s Epistle, perhaps written to accompany Picard’s draft or else after
Milton completed further revisions, presents the work as substantially complete and
ready for publication. While Milton may have dictated minor revisions up to the
time of his death, I suspect that the treatise was finished in all essential respects in
1658–65, in tandem with Paradise Lost.
Though a few scholars have called into question Milton’s authorship of De Doctrina
Christiana – some of them seeking to distance Milton’s poetry from its radical
heterodoxies – their arguments have not been widely accepted.^83 Milton’s author-
ship is manifest from the way he here reprises, often in very similar terms, the
specific heterodox doctrines, the several extreme positions, and the basic principles
- reason, liberty, charity – that inform his earlier prose works and his epic poetry.
How the work was composed is becoming clearer from renewed scholarly atten-
tion to the 745-page, much-revised manuscript.^84 Its loss and recovery makes a
scholarly adventure story. After Milton’s death, Daniel Skinner sent this treatise
along with a manuscript of Milton’s state papers to a Dutch publisher, Daniel Elzevier.
Skinner’s claim that Milton left “certain works behind him to me,” casting him as
something like a literary executor, may be greatly exaggerated, but apparently he
had had sufficient recent contact with Milton (probably as amanuensis and perhaps
also as student) to be allowed access to his papers by his widow.^85 Elzevier, advised
by a Dutch theologian that the treatise contained “the strongest Arianism” and
pressured by the English Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson not to publish
Milton’s “treasonous” letters, at length returned both manuscripts to Skinner’s fa-
ther early in 1677.^86 Skinner senior promptly turned them over to Williamson,
who deposited them in the State Paper Office where they lay forgotten until 1823.
They were then rediscovered, still in the original wrappings, and De Doctrina Christiana
was published two years later.^87
Addressing De Doctrina Christiana “To all the Churches of Christ and to All in
any part of the world who profess the Christian Faith,” Milton presents it as the
great work benefiting all Christendom that he had promised in the revised edition
of the Defensio (1658).^88 This Epistle describes the stages through which the text
evolved. Its first origins were in Milton’s boyhood when he undertook, as we
know, an “earnest study of the Old and New Testaments in their original lan-
guages.” At some point, convinced that God demands such an exercise of every
believer, he determined “to explore and think out my religious beliefs for myself by
my own exertions,” and began by going “diligently through some of the shorter
systems of theologians,” listing “under general headings whatever passages from the
scriptures suggested themselves for quotation, to be used hereafter as occasion might