Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England

Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England was John Milton's first prose tract on church government, published in 1641 when he was thirty-two. It appeared in the opening months of the Long Parliament, when the Root and Branch petition had brought the abolition of episcopacy before the nation and the pamphlet war over bishops was at its height. Milton had spent years preparing for poetry and a clerical career, and had abandoned the ministry in part because of what he saw in the established church. Now he entered the controversy on the side of the Presbyterian writers who answered Joseph Hall and the defenders of the bishops, addressing the work to a friend and presenting it in two books.

The treatise begins with a history of the English Reformation in which the unfinished work of reform is traced back through Tyndale, Cranmer, Latimer, and the Elizabethan settlement. Milton argues that bishops have repeatedly frustrated each stage of reform, and that the church's corruptions stem from its entanglement with worldly power. From there he turns to Scripture and the early church, contending that prelacy lacks scriptural warrant, that custom and the authority of the Fathers cannot stand in for the word of God, and that the prelates have in practice served the crown and their own wealth rather than the care of souls. In the second book he sets out the consequences: bishops draw the church toward outward ceremony and political calculation, and the proper discipline of a Christian community is the spiritual ordering of Christ's own kingdom. The tract closes with a famous prayer and a vision of a reformed England restored to Christ's rule, and its prose ranges from sustained argument to vehement satire.

The work matters first as a window onto the young Milton: it contains his early statement of the vocation to speak for the truth, and it anticipates themes that would run through the later tracts on divorce, liberty of the press, and the Commonwealth. It is also a vivid primary witness to the conviction that the Reformation was incomplete, and to the way seventeenth-century Protestants tied questions of church order to questions of conscience and freedom. Its argument that spiritual authority cannot be borrowed from political power remains a live question for any church tempted by alliance with the state.

Who should read this: students of Milton, the English Reformation, and the Puritan revolution, and readers who want to see how a theological controversy was fought in print. It is not an introduction to Christian formation or to Milton's poetry, and readers without patience for dense seventeenth-century polemic and its historical references will find it heavy going.