Apology against a Pamphlet

An Apology against a Pamphlet Call'd A Modest Confutation is John Milton's last and most personal contribution to the antiprelatical controversy of 1641 and 1642, published in the opening months of 1642. It answers A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell, an anonymous reply that defended Bishop Joseph Hall against the Smectymnuus pamphlets, to which Milton had lent his support in his own tracts against episcopacy. The Confuter, who has since been identified as Hall's son, did more than dispute Milton's arguments. He attacked the man, mocking his style, charging that he frequented playhouses and brothels, and insinuating that he had been expelled from Cambridge. Milton was a young and still obscure writer, and the Apology is the occasion on which he decided to answer for his own character in print.

The treatise works on two levels. In its polemical portions Milton defends the earlier antiprelatical tracts, rebuts the Confuter's charges point by point, and justifies the severity of his satire by appeal to the example of the prophets and of Christ against hypocrisy. His claim is that the zeal of a true reformer may rightly take the form of indignation. Set against this is a long autobiographical passage in which he describes his education, his reading of the poets and the Italian and classical authors, and his conviction that no one can write well of virtue who is not himself a true poem, a pattern of the honorable and praiseworthy things he writes about. Here he presents chastity as the governing discipline of his life, and he links his private purity to his public calling, both as a defender of the church's reformation and as a poet in training for some greater work. He also speaks of the ministry he had once been destined for and explains why he withdrew from it, when he judged that the prelatical church required of its servants a subscription he could not honestly give.

The Apology has lasting value for two reasons. It is among the very few places where Milton explains his own vocation and formation in his own words, and any serious reading of his later poetry, including Paradise Lost, is enriched by it. It also shows an early Protestant conviction about the connection between inward holiness and public speech, that those who rebuke the church must themselves live under the rule they commend.

Who should read this: readers of Milton, of seventeenth-century English church controversy, and of Christian vocation will find it rewarding, especially if they already know his antiprelatical tracts. It is not an introduction to Milton, and those looking for a systematic treatment of church government should begin elsewhere, since much of its argument is bound to the particulars of a quarrel with one anonymous opponent.