In his Areopagitica, published in November 1644, John Milton declared that ‘God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself’. The Lord would reveal himself ‘first to his Englishmen’, and London would be at the heart of the new reformation. ‘This vast City’, wrote Milton, was ‘the mansion-house of liberty’, for besides its anvils and hammers fashioning instruments for a just war, there were ‘pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new motions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation’.

From 1640 to 1645, Milton lived in Aldersgate Street, just ten or fifteen minutes walk from Coleman Street. He was a friend of Samuel Hartlib, Isaac Pennington junior and Doctor Nathan Paget, who were well known to Goodwin too. Goodwin and Milton also shared the same printer, Matthew Simmons, who saw a significant number of their pamphlets through the press. It is almost certain that the preacher and the poet knew each other personally – Goodwin may have been one of the thinkers Milton had in mind, ‘sitting by their studious lamps’. Milton's biographer, Dom Wolfe, once described the two men as ‘philosophical brothers’. The ideals and rhetoric of Areopagitica are certainly reminiscent of Goodwin's preface to A Treatise of Justification. Like Milton and the Hartlib circle, Goodwin was not itching to turn London into Calvin's Geneva or Knox's Edinburgh. His was a more expansive and dynamic vision of increasing knowledge, new light and ‘studious expeditions’ into uncharted territory.