Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon

Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon is a short political pamphlet that John Milton published in April 1660, in the final weeks before the Restoration of the monarchy. It answers a sermon preached on 25 March 1660 at Westminster Abbey by Matthew Griffith, a royalist clergyman, and published as The Fear of God and the King. Griffith had argued that fear of God and obedience to the king were bound together, and that those who had overthrown Charles I were guilty of rebellion against both. Milton, who had served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, wrote with the republic collapsing around him and General Monck's march toward a restored monarchy already under way.

The pamphlet is a close, combative reply, taking Griffith's sermon apart in the manner of a marginal commentary. Milton's central move is to turn Griffith's text against him. If the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, he argues, it cannot be made the servant of a particular form of government, and Scripture nowhere binds the faithful to kingship as a divine institution. He charges that the clergy who preach unconditional obedience to princes are seeking their own comfort and maintenance, and he presses a theme he had pursued for years: that a church tied to the power of the state, supported by tithes and compulsion, is corrupted by that dependence. Against the assumption that a godly nation must have a king, he sets the argument that a free commonwealth is the form of rule most consistent with a people who answer to God alone.

The work also shows what a defeated cause sounds like when it will not go quiet. Milton wrote it knowing that the tide had turned and that his own safety was in doubt, and it stands alongside The Readie and Easie Way, which he published in the same weeks, as his last public defense of the republican settlement. After the Restoration he was briefly arrested and his earlier writings were burned.

It remains worth reading for the way it joins theology and politics without confusing them. Milton insists that conscience before God cannot be delegated to a ruler or purchased by an established clergy, a conviction that runs through his poetry and prose alike and that later defenders of religious liberty would take up.

Who should read this: students of Milton, of the English Revolution, and of the long argument over church and state who want to hear him at full pitch and under pressure. It is a pamphlet of its moment, dense with seventeenth-century controversy and aimed at a sermon few now know, so it is not a place to begin for readers new to Milton or looking for devotional reading. Those who want his theology at its most contemplative should turn to Paradise Lost first.