Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church

John Milton published Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church in August 1659, in the last months of the English republic. The Commonwealth had tolerated a wide range of Protestant worship, but it still funded the clergy through tithes and a state-supported ministry, and a Parliament that had come to power by revolution was weighing the question again. Milton addressed the treatise to that Parliament, with a hope that the rule of the saints might at last be freed from a paid, privileged clerical order. It is a companion to his shorter tract A Treatise of Civil Power, issued earlier the same year, and the two together make his case for a church wholly separate from the magistrate's sword and the magistrate's purse.

The argument rests on a distinction between a hireling and a true minister. The gospel was freely given, Milton reasons, and so must be freely preached. Christ sent out his disciples without scrip or purse, and Paul labored with his own hands rather than make the gospel a burden. A clergy maintained by compulsory tithes, or by a fixed stipend set by law, has a motive for ministry that no scripture sanctions, and its interests tie it to the powers that pay it. Milton works through the Old Testament tithe, which he treats as part of the ceremonial law fulfilled and ended in Christ, and through the early church's practice, which he reads as voluntary giving. He then turns to the objections of his own day: that learning needs endowment, that a settled maintenance keeps ministers dependent on no one congregation, that the poor will be left without preaching. His answers are practical as well as theological. Let the gospel be preached freely, let congregations gather and support their teachers by willing gift, and let the universities be left to their proper work of learning rather than made nurseries of a clerical profession. Since the Spirit and the Scriptures are the true ground of ministry, he holds, no human credential can stand in for them.

The treatise has lasted as a document of English dissent and of the case for disestablishment, and it sheds light on the religious convictions behind the Milton of Paradise Lost, who thought of himself as a prophetic voice answerable to Scripture rather than to church or crown. Its particular proposals belong to 1659, and some of its sharpest rhetoric will strike readers as intemperate. Yet the underlying question has not gone away: how a ministry can stay free in a church that depends on it for a living, and what happens to preaching when it becomes a profession.

Who should read this: Readers of Milton, historians of the English Reformation and the Commonwealth, and anyone thinking about church and state, clergy pay, or the independence of the pulpit will find it rewarding. It is not for those who want a devotional work or an introduction to Milton's poetry, and it will frustrate anyone unwilling to follow a polemic written for a single political moment.