Of Prelatical Episcopacy

Of Prelatical Episcopacy is a short polemical treatise John Milton published in 1641, the third of his five antiprelatical tracts. It belongs to the pamphlet war that erupted when the Long Parliament convened and the government of the Church of England by bishops came under open attack. Archbishop James Ussher had answered the Smectymnuus pamphlets by defending episcopacy from the early Fathers, especially Ignatius of Antioch, and from Scripture. Milton, then in his early thirties and not yet the author of Paradise Lost, entered the argument by going after the evidence itself.

His strategy is to deny the bishops their antiquity. If prelatical episcopacy cannot claim the authority of the earliest church, it has only custom and the crown behind it. Milton presses the point on two fronts. On the testimony of the Fathers, he argues that the writings cited for the bishops are unreliable, corrupted by later hands, and in places contradict one another, so they cannot bear the weight put on them. He gives particular attention to the Ignatian letters and to the claim that apostolic succession set bishops over presbyters. On Scripture, he holds that the New Testament offers no warrant for a bishop ranked above presbyters, and that the church's earliest practice was governance by a company of elders. Beneath both arguments runs a conviction that recurs through his prose of this period: Scripture is the sufficient rule for the church, and no tradition, however venerable, may stand beside it as an equal. The tract is learned and combative, and it shows the habits of mind that later marked his defense of conscience and liberty.

The treatise has lasting value as an example of how Reformation principles about Scripture and authority were turned against an inherited church order. It documents a pivotal moment in English religious history, and it shows how Milton's theology and politics developed together. Its historical argument about the Fathers is now technical and dated, since patristic scholarship has moved on, but the underlying question of what authority governs the church remains live.

Who should read this: students of seventeenth-century English religion and of Milton's development as a thinker, and readers of the Reformed and Puritan traditions who want to see how the case against episcopacy was actually made. It is not for those looking for devotional warmth or a general introduction to Milton; it is a specialized controversial text, and it assumes patience with dense argument about early church sources.