Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus

John Milton's Animadversions, published anonymously in 1641, was his second prose attack on the English episcopate and the first in which he took up the controversialist's sword in earnest. It entered a pamphlet war already under way. Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich, had defended the government of the church by bishops in his Humble Remonstrance. The answer came from a group of five Presbyterian ministers whose initials formed the name Smectymnuus, among them Milton's former tutor Thomas Young. Hall replied with a Defence, and Milton's tract is a point-by-point reply to that reply, written as the Long Parliament was sitting and the future of church government in England was being openly contested.

The method is in the title. Milton quotes Hall's text passage by passage and answers each in turn, in a voice that swings between theological argument and open ridicule. On the substance, he contends that prelacy has no warrant in Scripture, that the appeal to the Church Fathers and to antiquity cannot bind a conscience that has the Bible before it, and that the bishops' claim to inherit apostolic authority is a later accretion bound up with worldly pomp and civil power. He presses the old Reformation principle that Scripture alone is the rule, and he sets the plain ministry of the New Testament against the courts, revenues and ceremonies of the established hierarchy. He accuses the prelates of corrupting both worship and discipline. Interleaved with the polemic are passages in which Milton's own vision surfaces, among them a prayer for the nation's reformation and the hope that God will raise up a church purified by his Word. The sarcasm that runs through the work drew criticism even from sympathetic readers, and Milton later defended it in the Apology as a lawful weapon against hypocrisy.

The tract matters first as an early document of Milton's religious and political thought, from which his later arguments for liberty of conscience and against coercion in matters of faith grew. It also records how a Protestant case against hierarchy was actually made in the heat of controversy, with the tone, the learning and the excesses that went with it. As devotional reading it is a different thing from the quiet works on this shelf, and it should be approached as polemic.

Who should read this: students of Milton, of the English Reformation and of the seventeenth-century debate over church government, and readers curious about how Puritan conviction sounded when it was angry. It is not for anyone seeking a calm treatment of church order or a work of spiritual guidance, and it assumes a willingness to follow an argument conducted in the idiom of a 1641 pamphlet quarrel.