“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665require.”^89 At this stage he was making a kind of Commonplace Book (“locos
communes digerere”), taking over formulations from standard Calvinist theolo-
gians and adding relevant scripture citations. Edward Phillips writes that when Milton
was keeping his school in the 1640s he dictated to his students on Sundays some
part of a “Tractate which he thought fit to collect from the ablest of Divines, who
had written of that subject; Amesius, Wollebius, &c. viz. A perfect System of Divin-
ity, of which more hereafter” (EL 61). Despite that promise Phillips does not say
anything more about this work, probably thinking it unwise to call attention to the
transformation of an early, largely orthodox manual into the heterodox De Doctrina
Christiana. As Maurice Kelley shows, elements of that earlier treatise are still present
in the existing one, as a first layer: its debts to John Wolleb’s Compendium Theologiae
Christianae and William Ames’s Medulla S.S. Theologiae are evident in the general
organization of books and chapters and in the closely parallel wording of some
passages.^90 As Milton gained confidence, the Epistle reports, he examined many
larger volumes of divinity and many disputes over doctrines, becoming increasingly
dissatisfied with mainstream theologians and their methods of argument. So he set
out to devise his own systematic theology based wholly on scripture: “I deemed it
therefore safest and most advisable to compile for myself, by my own labor and
study, some original treatise which should be always at hand, derived solely from
the word of God itself” (CM XIV, 7). This reworking produced the second layer of
the manuscript we have.
Milton did not, of course, suppose that he needed to revise and develop an
original argument about every precept of Christian doctrine. Where he substan-
tially agreed with orthodox definitions and explanations in Wolleb (Wollebius),
Ames, Perkins, and others he set them down in very similar terms. Such formula-
tions, repeated with slight variations again and again by theologians in the reformed
tradition, Milton would not think of as anyone’s property: they belonged to him
and to every Protestant. In such cases, he usually adds scripture citations and some-
times inserts a phrase or two that align the doctrine in question with his own
heterodoxies: e.g. where other treatises assign humankind’s regeneration to the
Trinity Milton assigns it to “God the Father, for no one generates except a fa-
ther.”^91 In other cases, when treating doctrines about which he holds heterodox or
highly unconventional views, he produces elaborate polemic arguments and scrip-
ture citations contesting the orthodox formulations and justifying his own posi-
tions. These sections vary in length according to the perceived difficulty of the case:
not surprisingly, book I, chapter 5, which challenges the core beliefs of almost all
Christendom about the Trinity, receives the longest treatment and its own preface.
The manuscript is, then, a multi-layered accretion of materials and arguments gath-
ered and formulated at various times. But Milton claims entire responsibility for all
that is here, insisting that he has arrived at these doctrinal positions after long study
and now presents them to the world at large as his “best and most precious posses-
sion.”^92 In further testimony to the substantial completeness of the treatise and its