Why did John Milton decide not to become a minister?

Although John Milton enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge, with the initial intention of entering the ministry, his reasons for ultimately deciding against it remain not fully explained.1

Several factors likely contributed to this choice:

• Academic Disdain: Milton may have lacked respect for fellow students pursuing the ministry, whom he viewed as academically ill-equipped.1
• Religious Dissent: As his Puritan inclinations matured, he grew increasingly critical of the established church and its rigid insistence on uniformity of worship.1
• Institutional Rejection: It is possible that his clear disaffection with the church hierarchy led the Church of England to reject him for ordination.1
• Intellectual Stifling: Milton was generally displeased with his time at Cambridge, finding the emphasis on Scholasticism to be detrimental to his imagination.1

Later in his career, Milton’s opposition to ecclesiastical hierarchy became a central theme in his antiprelatical tracts, where he criticized the structure of the church and eventually advocated for the primacy of individual conscience over established religious institutions.2