IN SEEKING TO be assured, then, Milton is making rules of his own, by unstated or declared assumptions. They are personal choices. Some were chosen by others of his time, though none match his completely. My points taken together may appear to be truisms, or anachronistic critique. After all, we start from where we are and how we are made. Every personal theology must be eclectic and include the contingent, in short, that personal element which runs strong in Milton yet was hidden from him—“what something hidden from us chose.” And though Milton is an early modern in much of his thinking, he does not ask the questions, such as Hobbes did, which led to the foundation of scriptural theology. What nonetheless gives De Doctrina life is its passionate and personal quality, engrossing to more than simply Milton scholars. Everything matters. The engaged style makes it matter.

Accordingly, I next show this quality by examining some of the mental acts that govern Milton's systematizing of scripture into doctrine. The Bible being his sole authority, his source throughout, how does he treat its materials—by what acts of omission, selection, change, and addition? For his own protestation enables us to approach his thought through these customary categories of source criticism. If source study works from a text to its sources in order to establish what these were, source criticism works from the known sources to the text in order to find what it did with them. Few works have such declared and binding sources as those of the Bible for De Doctrina. “I have preferred that my pages’ space should overflow with scriptural authorities assembled from all parts of the Bible, even when they repeat one another, and that as little room as possible be left for my own words, though they arise from the weaving together of the passages” (Epistle, 9).2 To the contrary, the present inquiry maintains that (whether or not his disclaimer was superseded but left standing in subsequent composition) his actual practice is less modest, and illuminates his seeking mind, its spirit—in a word, personality—seen in his acts of avoidance, insistence, reiteration, and modification, for they show what he wants and how he thinks he knows.