After the big Oxford edition appeared, I felt the urge to respond to Milton’s own invitation, to consider and appraise his giant work’s statement of beliefs. For it is a personal, opinionated work. It is provocative exegesis of scripture, whose ideas depart from those we infer from his greatest poems. He is driven by ideas and methods that are sometimes arbitrary. The work is personal, in several senses: my short study of it gives my own answers to his questions