"Owing to your protection, Supreme Senate, this liberty of writing which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of Church and State, and so far approved as to have been trusted with the representment and defence of your actions to all Christendom against an adversary of no mean repute, to whom should I address what I still publish on the same argument but to you, whose magnanimous counsels first opened and unbound the age from a double bondage under Prelatical and Regal tyranny, above our own hopes heartening us to look up at last like Men and Christians from the slavish dejection wherein from father to son we were bred up and taught, and thereby deserving of these nations, if they be not barbarously ingrateful, to be acknowledged, next under God, the authors and best patrons of Religious and Civil Liberty that ever these Islands brought forth? The care and tuition of whose peace and safety, after a short but scandalous night of interruption, is now again, by a new dawning of God's miraculous Providence among us, revolved upon your shoulders. And to whom more appertain these Considerations which I propound than to yourselves, and the debate before you, though I trust of no difficulty, yet at present of great expectation, not whether ye will gratify, were it no more than so, but whether ye will hearken to the just petition of many thousands best affected both to Religion and to this your return, or whether ye will satisfy (which you never can) the covetous pretences and demands of insatiable Hirelings, whose disaffection ye well know hath to yourselves and your resolutions? That I, though among many others in this common concernment, interpose to your deliberations what my thoughts also are, your own judgment and the success thereof hath given me the confidence: which requests but this—that, if I have prosperously, God so favouring me, defended the public cause of this Commonwealth to foreigners, ye would not think the reason and ability whereon ye trusted once (and repent not) your whole reputation to the world either grown less by more maturity and longer study or less available in English than in another tongue: but that, if it sufficed, some years past, to convince and satisfy the unengaged of other nations in the justice of your doings, though then held paradoxal, it may as well suffice now against weaker opposition in matters (except here in England, with a spirituality of men devoted to their temporal gain) of no controversy else among Protestants."
This is, unmistakeably, a public testimony of Milton's re-adhesion to the Rumpers, with something like an expression of regret that he had ever parted from them. After all, he could call them "the authors and best patrons of religious and civil liberty that ever these Islands brought forth"; and, with this renewed conviction, and remembering also their former confidence in himself, especially in the Salmasian controversy, he could now congratulate them and the country on their return to power. But is not the Address also a recantation of his Oliverianism? To some extent, it must be so interpreted. It seems utterly impossible, indeed, that the phrase "a short but scandalous night of interruption" was intended to apply to the entire six years of the Cromwellian Dictatorship and Protectorship. That had not been a "short" interruption, for it had exceeded in length the whole duration of the Commonwealth it had interrupted; and it would be the most marvellous inconsistency on record if Milton could ever have brought himself to call it "scandalous." Who had written the panegyric on Cromwell and his actually established Protectorship in the Defensio Secunda? Who had been Oliver's Latin Secretary from first to last, and penned for him his despatches on the Piedmontese massacre and all his greatest besides? The likelihood, therefore, is that "the short but scandalous night of interruption" in Milton's mind was the fortnight or so of Wallingford-House usurpation which broke up Richard's Parliament and Protectorate, and from the continuance of which, with all the inconveniences of a mere military despotism, the restoration of the Rump had seemed a happy rescue. But, though this single phrase may be thus explained, the tone of the whole address intimates far less of gratitude to Oliver dead than there had been of admiration for Oliver living. And the reason at this point is most obvious. Was it not precisely because Cromwell had failed to fulfil Milton's expectation of him, in his sonnet of May 1652, that he would deliver the Commonwealth from the plague of "hireling wolves," calling themselves a Clergy—was it not because Cromwell from first to last had pursued a contrary policy—that it remained for Milton now, seven years after the date of that sonnet, to have to offer, as a private thinker, and on mere printed paper, his own poor Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church? It was not in a pamphlet on that subject, wherever else, that Milton could say his best for the memory of Cromwell.
After some preliminary observations connecting the present treatise with its forerunner; Milton opens his subject thus:—
"Hire of itself is neither a thing unlawful, nor a word of any evil note, signifying no more than a due recompense or reward, as when our Saviour saith, 'The labourer is worthy of his hire.' That which makes it so dangerous in the Church, and properly makes HIRELING a word always of evil signification, is either the excess thereof or the undue manner of giving and taking it. What harm the excess thereof brought to the Church perhaps was not found by experience till the days of Constantine; who, out of his zeal, thinking he could be never too liberally a nursing father of the Church, might be not unfitly said to have either overlaid it or choked it in the nursing. Which was foretold, as is recorded in Ecclesiastical traditions, by a voice heard from Heaven, on the very day that those great donations of Church-revenues were given, crying aloud, 'This day is poison poured into the Church' [Note the adoption of the anecdote from Mr. Wall's letter]. Which the event soon after verified, as appears by another no less ancient observation, that 'Religion brought forth wealth, and the Daughter devoured the Mother.' But, long ere wealth came into the Church, so soon as any gain appeared in Religion, HIRELINGS were apparent, drawn in long before by the very scent thereof [References to Judas as the first hireling, to Simon Magus as the second, and to various texts in the Acts and Epistles proving that among the early preachers of Christianity there were men who preached 'for filthy lucre's sake,' or made a mere trade of the Gospel] .... Thus we see that not only the excess of Hire in wealthiest times, but also the undue and vicious taking or giving it, though but small or mean, as in the primitive times, gave to hirelings occasion, though not intended yet sufficient, to creep at first into the Church. Which argues also the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, to remove them quite, unless every minister were, as St. Paul, contented to teach gratis: but few such are to be found. As therefore we cannot justly take away all Hire in the Church, because we cannot otherwise quite remove Hirelings, so are we not, for the impossibility of removing them all, to use therefore no endeavour that fewest may come in, but rather, in regard the evil, do what we can, will always be incumbent and unavoidable, to use our utmost diligence how it may be least dangerous. Which will be likeliest effected if we consider,—first what recompense God hath ordained should be given to ministers of the Church (for that a recompense ought to be given them, and may by them justly be received, our Saviour himself, from the very light of reason and of equity, hath declared, Luke X. 7, 'The labourer is worthy of his hire'); next, by whom; and, lastly, in what manner."
In this passage and in other passages throughout the Treatise it is clear that Milton's ideal was a Church in which no minister should take pay at all for his preaching or ministry, whether pay from the state or from his hearers, but every minister should, as St. Paul did, preach, absolutely and systematically gratis, deriving his livelihood and his leisure to preach from his private resources, or, if he had none such, then from the practice of some calling or handicraft apart from his preaching. Deep down in Milton's mind, notwithstanding his professed deference to Christ's words, "The labourer is worthy of his hire," we can see this conviction that it would be better for the world if religious doctrine, or in fact doctrine of any kind, were never bought or sold, but all spiritual teachers were to abhor the very touch of money for their lessons, being either gentlemen of independent means who could propagate the truth splendidly from high motives, or else tent-makers, carpenters, and bricklayers, passionate with the possession of some truth to propagate. This, however, having been acknowledged to be perhaps an impossibility on any great scale, he goes on to inquire, as proposed, what the legitimate and divinely-appointed hire of Gospel-ministers is, from whom it may come, and in what manner. The general result is as follows:—I. The Tithes of the old Jewish dispensation are utterly abolished under the Gospel. Nearly half the treatise is an argument to this effect, and consequently for the immediate abolition of the tithe-system in England. Here Milton lends his whole force to the popular current on this subject among the friends of "the good old cause," advocating those petitions to the Rump of which he has spoken in his preface. But he goes farther than the abolition of tithes. He will not allow of any statutory substitute for tithes, any taxation of the people in any form for the support of Religion. The only substitute for tithes which he discusses specifically is compulsory church-fees for ministerial offices, such as baptisms, marriages, and burials. These, as well as tithes, he utterly condemns; and he winds up this part of his inquiry thus: "Seeing, then, that God hath given to ministers under the Gospel that only which is justly given them (that is to say, a due and moderate livelihood, the hire of their labour), and that the heave-offering of Tithes is abolished with the Altar (yes, though not abolished, yet lawless as they enjoy them), their Melchizedekian right also trivial and groundless, and both tithes and fees, if exacted or established, unjust and scandalous, we may hope, with them removed, to remove Hirelings in some good measure." II. It is maintained that the lawful maintenance of the ministry can consist only in the voluntary offerings of those they instruct, whether tendered individually, or collected into a common treasury for distribution. The flocks ought to maintain their own pastors, and no others are bound to contribute for the purpose. But what of poor neighbourhoods that cannot maintain pastors and yet need them most sorely? Milton has unbounded confidence that these will be overtaken and provided for by the zeal of pious individuals, or by "the charity of richer congregations," taking the form of itinerant missions. "If it be objected that this itinerary preaching will not serve to plant the Gospel in those places unless they who are sent abide there some competent time, I answer that, if they stay there for a year or two, which was the longest time usually staid by the Apostles in one place, it may suffice to teach them who will attend and learn all the points of Religion necessary to salvation: then, sorting them into several congregations of a moderate number, out of the ablest and zealousest of them to create elders, who, exercising and requiring from themselves what they have learnt (for no learning is retained without constant exercise and methodical repetition), may teach and govern the rest: and, so exhorted to continue faithful and stedfast, they may securely be committed to the providence of God and the guidance of his Holy Spirit till God may offer some opportunity to visit them again and to confirm them." The only concession Milton will make is that, in cases of urgent necessity, application may be made to magistrates or other trustees of charitable funds for aid in these temporary and itinerant missions. For the rest, it will be seen, it is with difficulty that he allows the existence of a permanent pastorate anywhere. If there is to be a body of men in the community making a business of preaching, and if in towns and populous neighbourhoods congregations choose to retain the services, for life or for an indefinite period, of particular ministerial persons selected from this body, and to erect handsome buildings convenient for such services, well and good, or rather it cannot be helped; but the picture most to Milton's fancy is that of an England generally, or at all events of a rural England, without any fixed or regular parish pastors or parish-churches, but each little local cluster of believers meeting on Sundays or other days in chapel or barn for mutual edification, or to be instructed by such simple teaching elders as may easily, from time to time, be produced within itself. Add the itinerant agency of more practiced and professional preachers, circulating periodically among the local clusters, to rouse them or keep them alive; and nothing more would be needed. There would be plenty of preaching, and good preaching, everywhere; but, as most of it would be spontaneous by hard-handed men known among their neighbours, and working, like their neighbours, for their ordinary subsistence, the preaching profession, as a means of income, would be reduced to a minimum. In a Church so constituted there would still be hirelings, especially in large towns and where there were wealthy congregations; but the number of such would be greatly reduced. III. Under the third head of the "manner" of the recompense to ministers, where there is any recompense at all, the substance of Milton's remarks is that the purely voluntary character of the recompense must be studiously maintained. It must be purely an alms, an oblation of benevolence. Hence it should never take the form of a life-endowment, or even of a contract conferring a legal title to demand payment. The appearance of a minister of the Gospel in a law-court to sue for money supposed to be due to him for his ministerial services, even by promise or agreement, is spoken of with disgust. Were it the understood rule that there could be no recovery by a minister even of his promised salary, would not that also tend in some degree to keep Hirelings out of the Church?
The pamphlet, it will be seen, is more outspoken and thoroughgoing than its forerunner. It contains also more of those individual passages that represent Milton in his rough mood of sarcastic strength, though none of such beauty or eloquence as are to be found in his earlier pamphlets. The following are characteristic:—
Mr. Prynne's Defences of Tithes:—"To heap such unconvincing citations as these in Religion, whereof the Scripture only is our rule, argues not much learning nor judgment, but the lost labour of much unprofitable reading. And yet a late hot Querist for Tithes, whom ye may know, by his wits lying ever beside him in the margin, to be ever beside his wits in the text,—a fierce Reformer once, now rankled with a contrary heat,—would send us back, very reformedly indeed, to learn Reformation from Tyndarus and Rebuffas, two Canonical Promoters."1
1: The reference is to Prynne's Ten Considerable Queries concerning Tithes, &c., against the Petitioners and Petitions for their Total Abolition: 1659.
Marriages and Clerical Concern in the same:—"As for Marriages, that ministers should meddle with them, as not sanctioned or legitimate without their celebration, I find no ground in Scripture either of precept or example. Likeliest it is (which our Selden hath well observed I. II. c. 28. Ux. Heb.) that in imitation of heathen priests, who were wont at nuptials to use many rites and ceremonies, and especially judging it would be profitable and the increase of their authority not to be spectators only in business of such concernment to the life of man, they insinuated that marriage was not holy without their benediction, and for the better colour made it a Sacrament; being of itself a Civil Ordinance, a household contract, a thing indifferent and free to the whole race of mankind, not as religious, but as men. Best, indeed, undertaken to religious ends, as the Apostle saith (1 Cor. VII. 'In the Lord'); yet not therefore invalid or unholy without a minister and his pretended necessary hallowing, more than any other act, enterprise, or contract, of civil life,—which ought all to be done also in the Lord and to his glory,—all which, no less than marriage, were by the cunning of priests heretofore, as material to their profit, transacted at the altar. Our Divines deny it to be a Sacrament; yet retained the celebration, till prudently a late Parliament recovered the civil liberty of marriage from their encroachment, and transferred the ratifying and registering thereof from their Canonical Shop to the proper cognisance of Civil Magistrates" [The Marriages Act of the Barebones Parliament; in accordance with which had been Milton's own second marriage: see ante p. 281, and Vol. IV. p. 511].
Sitting under a Stated Minister:—"If men be not all their lifetime under a teacher to learn Logic, Natural Philosophy, Ethics, or Mathematics, ... certainly it is not necessary to the attainment of Christian knowledge that men should sit all their life long at the foot of a pulpited divine, while he, a lollard indeed over his elbow-cushion, in almost the seventh part of forty or fifty years, teaches them scarce half the principles of Religion, and his sheep ofttimes sit the while to as little purpose of benefiting as the sheep in their pews at Smithfield."
Congregations for mutual Edification:—"Notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of some devoted still ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured that He who disdained not to be laid in a manger disdains not to be preached in a barn, and that by such meetings as these, being indeed most apostolical and primitive, they will in a short time advance more in Christian knowledge and reformation of life than by the many years preaching of such an incumbent,—I may say such an incubus ofttimes,—as will be meanly hired to abide long in those places."
A Reflection on Cromwell for his Established Church:—"For the magistrate, in person of a nursing father, to make the Church his mere ward, as always in minority,-the Church to whom he ought as a Magistrate (Isaiah XLIS. 23) 'to bow down with his face toward the earth and lick up the dust of her feet,'—her to subject to his political drifts and conceived opinions by mastering her revenue, and so by his examinant Committees to circumscribe her free election of ministers,—is neither just nor pious: no honour done to the Church, but a plain dishonour."
University Education of Ministers:—State of the Facts: "They pretend that their education, either at School or University, hath been very chargeable, and therefore ought to be repaired in future by a plentiful maintenance: whereas it is well known that the better half of them, and ofttimes poor and pitiful boys, of no merit or promising hopes that might entitle them to the public provision but their poverty and the unjust favour of friends, have had the most of their breeding, both at School and University, by scholarships, exhibitions, and fellowships, at the public cost,—which might engage them the rather to give freely, as they have freely received. Or, if they have missed of these helps at the latter place, they have after two or three years left the course of their studies there, if they ever well began them, and undertaken, though furnished with little else but ignorance, boldness, and ambition, if with no worse vices, a chaplainship in some gentleman's house, to the frequent imbasing of his sons with illiterate and narrow principles. Or, if they have lived there [at the University] upon their own, who knows not that seven years' charge of living there,—to them who fly not from the government of their parents to the licence of a University, but come seriously to study,—is no more than, may be well defrayed and reimbursed by one year's revenue of an ordinary good benefice? If they had then means of breeding from their parents, 'tis likely they have more now; and, if they have, it needs must be mechanic and uningenuous in them to bring a bill of charges for the learning of those liberal Arts and Sciences which they have learnt (if they have indeed learnt them, as they seldom have) to their own benefit and accomplishment. But they will say 'We had betaken us to some other trade or profession, had we not expected to find a better livelihood by the Ministry.' This is what I looked for,—to discover them openly neither true lovers of Learning and so very seldom guilty of it, nor true ministers of the Gospel."
University Education of Ministers not Necessary: "What Learning, either human or divine, can be necessary to a minister may as easily and less chargeably be had in any private house ... Those theological disputations there held [i.e. at the Universities] by Professors and Graduates are such as tend least of all to the edification or capacity of the people, but rather perplex and leaven pure doctrine with scholastical trash than enable any minister to the better preaching of the Gospel. Whence we may also compute, since they come to reckonings, the charges of his needful library; which, though some shame not to value at £600 [equivalent to £2000 now], may be competently furnished for £60 [equivalent to £200 now]. If any man, for his own curiosity or delight, be in books further expensive, that is not to be reckoned as necessary to his ministerial either breeding or function. But Papists and other adversaries cannot be confuted without Fathers and Councils, immense volumes and of vast charges! I will show them therefore a shorter and a better way of confutation: Tit. I. 9; 'Holding fast the faithful Word as he hath been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and to convince gainsayers,'—who are confuted as soon as heard bringing that which is either not in Scripture or against it. To pursue them further through the obscure and entangled wood of antiquity, Fathers and Councils fighting one against another, is needless, endless, not requisite in a minister, and refused by the first Reformers of our Religion. And yet we may be confident, if these things be thought needful, let the State but erect in public good store of Libraries, and there will not want men in the Church who of their own inclinations will become able in this kind against Papists or any other Adversary."
No Parliament that England ever saw, not even the Barebones Parliament itself, could have entertained for a moment, with a view to practical legislation, these speculations of the blind Titan in all their length and breadth. Disestablishment, Disendowment, Abolition of a Clergy, had been the dream of the Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men of the Barebones Parliament. Even in that House, however, the battle practically, and on which the House broke up, was on the question of the continuance of Tithes, and it is dubious whether some in that half of the House which voted against Tithes would not have been for preserving a Church Establishment or Preaching Ministry by some other form of state-maintenance. Nor can one imagine, even in those eager and revolutionary times, an utter disregard of that principle of compensation for life-interests which any Parliament now, contemplating a scheme of Disestablishment, would consider binding in common equity. The old Bishops, and the Prelatic Clergy, indeed, had been disestablished without much consideration of life-interests; but the procedure in their case had been of a penal character, and it is unlikely that it would have been equally unceremonious with the new clergy of Presbyterians and Independents, allowed generally to be orthodox. From any hesitation on that score Milton is absolutely free. He sees no difficulties, takes regard of none. It is not with a flesh-and-blood world that he deals, a world of men, and their wives, and their families, and their yearly incomes, and their fixed residences and household belongings. It is with a world of wax, or of flesh and blood that must be content to be treated as wax. It is thought right to disestablish the Church: well, then, let the Clergy go! Abolish tithes; provide no substitute; proclaim that, after this day week, or the first day of the next year, not a penny shall be paid to any man by the State for preaching the Gospel, or doing any other act of the ministry: and what then? Why, there will be a flutter of consternation, of course, through some ten thousand or twelve thousand parsonages; ten thousand or twelve thousand clerical gentlemen will stare bewilderedly for a while at their wives' faces: but do not be too much concerned! They will all shift very well for themselves when they know they must; the best of them will find congregations where they are, or in other places, and will work all the harder; and, if the drones and dotards go threadbare and starve for the rest of their lives, that is but God's way with such since the beginning of the world! Be instant, be rapid, be decisive, be thoroughgoing, O ye statesmen! What are vested interests in the Church of Christ?