In 1641 Milton writes his fourth in a series of five pamphlets attacking the bishops of the Anglican Church. The Reason of Church-Government, published in 1642, has been long considered the most important of the five, largely due to the preface to Book 2 where Milton talks at some length about himself. For the first time in an unequivocal way, he announces his poetic ambitions to write vernacular poetry in the service of God and his country. Providing a highly selective account of his past, Milton talks of "an inward prompting which now grew daily" upon him that "by labour and intent study" (which he believes to be his "portion in this life"), he "might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die." Critics have largely accepted these statements as evidence that by 1641 Milton had opted for a poetic rather than a church career, yet a close scrutiny of these remarks reveals no mention of a date when such a decision occurred, when precisely he was "Church-outed by the Prelats," which is how he describes himself at the end of the introduction to the tract's second book (YP, I, 823). Complicating the matter further are additional comments in The Reason of Church-Government which inform Milton's readers that it was the church "to whose service by the intentions of my parents and friends I was destin'd of a child" (YP, I, 822).