Areopagitica
by
John Milton








AREOPAGITICA


A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING
TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND


This is true liberty, when free-born men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise;
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace:
What can be juster in a state than this?

Euripid. Hicetid.



They, who to states and governors of the Commonwealth direct
their speech, High Court of Parliament, or, wanting such access in
a private condition, write that which they foresee may advance the
public good; I suppose them, as at the beginning of no mean
endeavour, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds:
some with doubt of what will be the success, others with fear of
what will be the censure; some with hope, others with confidence of
what they have to speak. And me perhaps each of these
dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have at
other times variously affected; and likely might in these foremost
expressions now also disclose which of them swayed most, but that
the very attempt of this address thus made, and the thought of whom
it hath recourse to, hath got the power within me to a passion, far
more welcome than incidental to a preface.

Which though I stay not to confess ere any ask, I shall be
blameless, if it be no other than the joy and gratulation which it
brings to all who wish and promote their country's liberty; whereof
this whole discourse proposed will be a certain testimony, if not
a trophy. For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no
grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth--that let no man in
this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply
considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil
liberty attained that wise men look for. To which if I now
manifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that we are
already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep
disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our
principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will
be attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of
God our deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted
wisdom, Lords and Commons of England. Neither is it in God's
esteem the diminution of his glory, when honourable things are
spoken of good men and worthy magistrates; which if I now first
should begin to do, after so fair a progress of your laudable
deeds, and such a long obligement upon the whole realm to your
indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckoned among the
tardiest, and the unwillingest of them that praise ye.

Nevertheless there being three principal things, without which
all praising is but courtship and flattery: First, when that only
is praised which is solidly worth praise: next, when greatest
likelihoods are brought that such things are truly and really in
those persons to whom they are ascribed: the other, when he who
praises, by showing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he
writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two of
these I have heretofore endeavoured, rescuing the employment from
him who went about to impair your merits with a trivial and
malignant encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine own
acquittal, that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath been
reserved opportunely to this occasion.

For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears
not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the
best covenant of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and
his hope waits on your proceedings. His highest praising is not
flattery, and his plainest advice is a kind of praising. For
though I should affirm and hold by argument, that it would fare
better with truth, with learning and the Commonwealth, if one of
your published Orders, which I should name, were called in; yet at
the same time it could not but much redound to the lustre of your
mild and equal government, whenas private persons are hereby
animated to think ye better pleased with public advice, than other
statists have been delighted heretofore with public flattery. And
men will then see what difference there is between the magnanimity
of a triennial Parliament, and that jealous haughtiness of prelates
and cabin counsellors that usurped of late, whenas they shall
observe ye in the midst of your victories and successes more gently
brooking written exceptions against a voted Order than other
courts, which had produced nothing worth memory but the weak
ostentation of wealth, would have endured the least signified
dislike at any sudden proclamation.

If I should thus far presume upon the meek demeanour of your
civil and gentle greatness, Lords and Commons, as what your
published Order hath directly said, that to gainsay, I might defend
myself with ease, if any should accuse me of being new or insolent,
did they but know how much better I find ye esteem it to imitate
the old and elegant humanity of Greece, than the barbaric pride of
a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. And out of those ages, to
whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not yet Goths
and Jutlanders, I could name him who from his private house wrote
that discourse to the Parliament of Athens, that persuades them to
change the form of democracy which was then established. Such
honour was done in those days to men who professed the study of
wisdom and eloquence, not only in their own country, but in other
lands, that cities and signiories heard them gladly, and with great
respect, if they had aught in public to admonish the state. Thus
did Dion Prusaeus, a stranger and a private orator, counsel the
Rhodians against a former edict; and I abound with other like
examples, which to set here would be superfluous.

But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious
labours, and those natural endowments haply not the worst for two
and fifty degrees of northern latitude, so much must be derogated,
as to count me not equal to any of those who had this privilege, I
would obtain to be thought not so inferior, as yourselves are
superior to the most of them who received their counsel: and how
far you excel them, be assured, Lords and Commons, there can no
greater testimony appear, than when your prudent spirit
acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever
it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any Act
of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your predecessors.

If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye were
not, I know not what should withhold me from presenting ye with a
fit instance wherein to show both that love of truth which ye
eminently profess, and that uprightness of your judgment which is
not wont to be partial to yourselves; by judging over again that
Order which ye have ordained to regulate printing:--that no book,
pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be
first approved and licensed by such, or at least one of such, as
shall be thereto appointed. For that part which preserves justly
every man's copy to himself, or provides for the poor, I touch not,
only wish they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute honest
and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars.
But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had died
with his brother quadragesimal and matrimonial when the prelates
expired, I shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before
ye, first the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to
own; next what is to be thought in general of reading, whatever
sort the books be; and that this Order avails nothing to the
suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, which
were mainly intended to be suppressed. Last, that it will be
primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of
truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what
we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that
might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean
themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and
do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not
absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to
be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do
preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that
living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as
vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being
sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on
the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man
as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature,
God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself,
kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a
burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of
a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life
beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps
there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover
the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations
fare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against
the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life
of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it
extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the
execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes
at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself,
slays an immortality rather than a life. But lest I should be
condemned of introducing license, while I oppose licensing, I
refuse not the pains to be so much historical, as will serve to
show what hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealths
against this disorder, till the very time that this project of
licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was catched up by our
prelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters.

In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any
other part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which
the magistrate cared to take notice of; those either blasphemous
and atheistical, or libellous. Thus the books of Protagoras were
by the judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himself
banished the territory for a discourse begun with his confessing
not to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS, OR WHETHER NOT. And
against defaming, it was decreed that none should be traduced by
name, as was the manner of Vetus Comoedia, whereby we may guess how
they censured libelling. And this course was quick enough, as
Cicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists,
and the open way of defaming, as the event showed. Of other sects
and opinions, though tending to voluptuousness, and the denying of
divine Providence, they took no heed.

Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine
school of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever
questioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings
of those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them
were forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes,
the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, is
commonly known, and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom, as is
reported, nightly studied so much the same author and had the art
to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing
sermon.

That other leading city of Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that
Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to
have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works
of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and
mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the
better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered
how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats
of war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for they
disliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, and took a slight
occasion to chase Archilochus out of their city, perhaps for
composing in a higher strain than their own soldierly ballads and
roundels could reach to. Or if it were for his broad verses, they
were not therein so cautious but they were as dissolute in their
promiscuous conversing; whence Euripides affirms in Andromache,
that their women were all unchaste. Thus much may give us light
after what sort of books were prohibited among the Greeks.

The Romans also, for many ages trained up only to a military
roughness resembling most the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learning
little but what their twelve Tables, and the Pontific College with
their augurs and flamens taught them in religion and law; so
unacquainted with other learning, that when Carneades and
Critolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes, coming ambassadors to Rome,
took thereby occasion to give the city a taste of their philosophy,
they were suspected for seducers by no less a man than Cato the
Censor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss them speedily, and to
banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipio and others
of the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine austerity;
honoured and admired the men; and the censor himself at last, in
his old age, fell to the study of that whereof before he was so
scrupulous. And yet at the same time Naevius and Plautus, the
first Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowed
scenes of Menander and Philemon. Then began to be considered there
also what was to be done to libellous books and authors; for
Naevius was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, and
released by the tribunes upon his recantation; we read also that
libels were burnt, and the makers punished by Augustus. The like
severity, no doubt, was used, if aught were impiously written
against their esteemed gods. Except in these two points, how the
world went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning.

And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies his
Epicurism to Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second
time by Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; although
himself disputes against that opinion in his own writings. Nor was
the satirical sharpness or naked plainness of Lucilius, or
Catullus, or Flaccus, by any order prohibited. And for matters of
state, the story of Titus Livius, though it extolled that part
which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by Octavius Caesar
of the other faction. But that Naso was by him banished in his old
age, for the wanton poems of his youth, was but a mere covert of
state over some secret cause: and besides, the books were neither
banished nor called in. From hence we shall meet with little else
but tyranny in the Roman empire, that we may not marvel, if not so
often bad as good books were silenced. I shall therefore deem to
have been large enough, in producing what among the ancients was
punishable to write; save only which, all other arguments were free
to treat on.

By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose
discipline in this point I do not find to have been more severe
than what was formerly in practice. The books of those whom they
took to be grand heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned in
the general Councils; and not till then were prohibited, or burnt,
by authority of the emperor. As for the writings of heathen
authors, unless they were plain invectives against Christianity, as
those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with no interdict that
can be cited, till about the year 400, in a Carthaginian Council,
wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books of
Gentiles, but heresies they might read: while others long before
them, on the contrary, scrupled more the books of heretics than of
Gentiles. And that the primitive Councils and bishops were wont
only to declare what books were not commendable, passing no
further, but leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to lay
by, till after the year 800, is observed already by Padre Paolo,
the great unmasker of the Trentine Council.

After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased
of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion
over men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning
and prohibiting to be read what they fancied not; yet sparing in
their censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with:
till Martin V., by his bull, not only prohibited, but was the first
that excommunicated the reading of heretical books; for about that
time Wickliffe and Huss, growing terrible, were they who first
drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of prohibiting. Which
course Leo X. and his successors followed, until the Council of
Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought
forth, or perfected, those Catalogues and expurging Indexes, that
rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a
violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did
they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to
their palate, they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it
straight into the new purgatory of an index.

To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was
to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if
St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of
Paradise) unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of
two or three glutton friars. For example:


Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present
work be contained aught that may withstand the printing.

VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence.

I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the
Catholic faith and good manners: in witness whereof I
have given, etc.


NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence.


Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this
present work of Davanzati may be printed.


VINCENT RABBATTA, etc.


It may be printed, July 15.

FRIAR SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA,
Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence.


Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not
long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him
down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody
the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended, but went
not through with. Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the
Roman stamp:


Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the

Holy Palace.


BELCASTRO, Vicegerent.


Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.


Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the
piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other
with their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in
perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the
sponge. These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear
antiphonies, that so bewitched of late our prelates and their
chaplains with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to the
gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House,
another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly Romanizing, that
the word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learned
grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; or
perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to
express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope,
for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost
in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile
letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption English.

And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing
ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not,
that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church;
nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor
from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but
from the most anti-christian council and the most tyrannous
inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as
freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the
brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb: no envious
Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man's intellectual
offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies, but that it was
justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a book, in worse
condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere
it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment
of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward
into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity,
provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, sought
out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books
also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare
morsel so officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated
by our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their
chaplains. That ye like not now these most certain authors of this
licensing order, and that all sinister intention was far distant
from your thoughts, when ye were importuned the passing it, all men
who know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honour truth,
will clear ye readily.

But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing
for all that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no such
deep invention, but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and
yet best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions
have forborne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men
were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to
obstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation; I am of
those who believe it will be a harder alchemy than Lullius ever
knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this
only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be
held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves,
for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the
properties it has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded,
what is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sort
they be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm that thence
proceeds.

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who
were skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and
Greeks, which could not probably be without reading their books of
all sorts; in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement to
insert into Holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and
one of them a tragedian; the question was notwithstanding sometimes
controverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on
that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable; as was then
evidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate and subtlest enemy to
our faith made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen
learning: for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and
with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the
Christians were put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and so
much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two
Apollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the seven
liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms of
orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new
Christian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the
providence of God provided better than the industry of Apollinarius
and his son, by taking away that illiterate law with the life of
him who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to be
deprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a persecution more
undermining, and secretly decaying the Church, than the open
cruelty of Decius or Diocletian.

And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil
whipped St. Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or else
it was a phantasm bred by the fever which had then seized him. For
had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too
much upon Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading, not the
vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for grave
Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus, whom he confesses to have been
reading, not long before; next to correct him only, and let so many
more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies
without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil
teaches how some good use may be made of Margites, a sportful
poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of
Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a
vision recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of
Jerome, to the nun Eustochium, and, besides, has nothing of a fever
in it. Dionysius Alexandrinus was about the year 240 a person of
great name in the Church for piety and learning, who had wont to
avail himself much against heretics by being conversant in their
books; until a certain presbyter laid it scrupulously to his
conscience, how he durst venture himself among those defiling
volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into a new
debate with himself what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision
sent from God (it is his own epistle that so avers it) confirmed
him in these words: READ ANY BOOKS WHATEVER COME TO THY HANDS,
FOR THOU ART SUFFICIENT BOTH TO JUDGE ARIGHT AND TO EXAMINE EACH
MATTER. To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he
confesses, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to the
Thessalonians, PROVE ALL THINGS, HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD.
And he might have added another remarkable saying of the same
author: TO THE PURE, ALL THINGS ARE PURE; not only meats and
drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the
knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will
and conscience be not defiled.

For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of
evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said
without exception, RISE, PETER, KILL AND EAT, leaving the
choice to each man's discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated
stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books
to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad
meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest
concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to
a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover,
to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what better
witness can ye expect I should produce, than one of your own now
sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this
land, Mr. Selden; whose volume of natural and national laws proves,
not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite
reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all
opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main
service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is
truest. I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the
universal diet of man's body, saving ever the rules of temperance,
he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting
of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise
his own leading capacity.

How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the
whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust,
without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of
every grown man. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews
from heaven, that omer, which was every man's daily portion of
manna, is computed to have been more than might have well sufficed
the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions which
enter into a man, rather than issue out of him, and therefore
defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood
of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his
own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law
and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which
heretofore were governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us,
that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; but neither he nor
other inspired author tells us that such or such reading is
unlawful: yet certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it
had been much more expedient to have told us what was unlawful than
what was wearisome. As for the burning of those Ephesian books by
St. Paul's converts; 'tis replied the books were magic, the Syriac
so renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves
us to a voluntary imitation: the men in remorse burnt those books
which were their own; the magistrate by this example is not
appointed; these men practised the books, another might perhaps
have read them in some sort usefully.

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up
together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so
involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many
cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused
seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull
out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out
the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil,
as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And
perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and
evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the
state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what
continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can
apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming
pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer
that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue
therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil,
and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and
rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but
an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage and
serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under
the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave
of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and
know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of
vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human
virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how
can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of
sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing
all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of
books promiscuously read.

But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usually
reckoned. First, is feared the infection that may spread; but then
all human learning and controversy in religious points must remove
out of the world, yea the Bible itself; for that ofttimes relates
blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnal sense of wicked men
not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring
against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other
great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common
reader. And ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginal
Keri, that Moses and all the prophets cannot persuade him to
pronounce the textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know the
Bible itself put by the Papist must be next removed, as Clement of
Alexandria, and that Eusebian book of Evangelic preparation,
transmitting our ears through a hoard of heathenish obscenities to
receive the Gospel. Who finds not that Irenaeus, Epiphanius,
Jerome, and others discover more heresies than they well confute,
and that oft for heresy which is the truer opinion?

Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers of
greatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up
the life of human learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, so
long as we are sure those languages are known as well to the worst
of men, who are both most able and most diligent to instil the
poison they suck, first into the courts of princes, acquainting
them with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin. As perhaps
did that Petronius whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his
revels; and the notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded and yet dear to
the Italian courtiers. I name not him for posterity's sake, whom
Henry VIII. named in merriment his vicar of hell. By which
compendious way all the contagion that foreign books can infuse
will find a passage to the people far easier and shorter than an
Indian voyage, though it could be sailed either by the north of
Cataio eastward, or of Canada westward, while our Spanish licensing
gags the English press never so severely.

But on the other side that infection which is from books of
controversy in religion is more doubtful and dangerous to the
learned than to the ignorant; and yet those books must be permitted
untouched by the licenser. It will be hard to instance where any
ignorant man hath been ever seduced by papistical book in English,
unless it were commended and expounded to him by some of that
clergy: and indeed all such tractates, whether false or true, are
as the prophecy of Isaiah was to the eunuch, not to be
UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT A GUIDE. But of our priests and doctors how
many have been corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits and
Sorbonists, and how fast they could transfuse that corruption into
the people, our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot,
since the acute and distinct Arminius was perverted merely by the
perusing of a nameless discourse written at Delft, which at first
he took in hand to confute.

Seeing, therefore, that those books, and those in great
abundance, which are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine,
cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning and of all
ability in disputation, and that these books of either sort are
most and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the common
people whatever is heretical or dissolute may quickly be conveyed,
and that evil manners are as perfectly learnt without books a
thousand other ways which cannot be stopped, and evil doctrine not
with books can propagate, except a teacher guide, which he might
also do without writing, and so beyond prohibiting, I am not able
to unfold, how this cautelous enterprise of licensing can be
exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And he
who were pleasantly disposed could not well avoid to liken it to
the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows
by shutting his park gate.

Besides another inconvenience, if learned men be the first
receivers out of books and dispreaders both of vice and error, how
shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer
upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the
land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness? And again,
if it be true that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold
out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with
the best book, yea or without book; there is no reason that we
should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we
seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrained will be
no hindrance to his folly. For if there should be so much
exactness always used to keep that from him which is unfit for his
reading, we should in the judgment of Aristotle not only, but of
Solomon and of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him good precepts, and by
consequence not willingly admit him to good books; as being certain
that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, than a
fool will do of sacred Scripture.

'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations
without necessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vain
things. To both these objections one answer will serve, out of the
grounds already laid, that to all men such books are not
temptations, nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials wherewith
to temper and compose effective and strong medicines, which man's
life cannot want. The rest, as children and childish men, who have
not the art to qualify and prepare these working minerals, well may
be exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly they cannot be by all
the licensing that Sainted Inquisition could ever yet contrive.
Which is what I promised to deliver next: that this order of
licensing conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed; and
hath almost prevented me by being clear already while thus much
hath been explaining. See the ingenuity of Truth, who, when she
gets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace of
method and discourse can overtake her.

It was the task which I began with, to show that no nation, or
well-instituted state, if they valued books at all, did ever use
this way of licensing; and it might be answered, that this is a
piece of prudence lately discovered. To which I return, that as it
was a thing slight and obvious to think on, so if it had been
difficult to find out, there wanted not among them long since who
suggested such a course; which they not following, leave us a
pattern of their judgment that it was not the rest knowing, but the
not approving, which was the cause of their not using it.

Plato, a man of high authority, indeed, but least of all for his
Commonwealth, in the book of his Laws, which no city ever yet
received, fed his fancy by making many edicts to his airy
burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him wish had been
rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an Academic night
sitting. By which laws he seems to tolerate no kind of learning
but by unalterable decree, consisting most of practical traditions,
to the attainment whereof a library of smaller bulk than his own
Dialogues would be abundant. And there also enacts, that no poet
should so much as read to any private man what he had written,
until the judges and law-keepers had seen it, and allowed it. But
that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he
had imagined, and to no other, is evident. Why was he not else a
lawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by his
own magistrates; both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues which
he made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus and
Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy, and also for commending the
latter of them, though he were the malicious libeller of his chief
friends, to be read by the tyrant Dionysius, who had little need of
such trash to spend his time on? But that he knew this licensing
of poems had reference and dependence to many other provisos there
set down in his fancied republic, which in this world could have no
place: and so neither he himself, nor any magistrate or city, ever
imitated that course, which, taken apart from those other
collateral injunctions, must needs be vain and fruitless. For if
they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were equal
to regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind,
that single endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour; to shut
and fortify one gate against corruption, and be necessitated to
leave others round about wide open.

If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we
must regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful
to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what
is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no
gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by
their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was
provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to
examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house;
they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be
licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and
madrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and
the balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, with
dangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them,
shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors
to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to
the ballatry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these
are the countryman's Arcadias, and his Monte Mayors.

Next, what more national corruption, for which England hears ill
abroad, than household gluttony: who shall be the rectors of our
daily rioting? And what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes
that frequent those houses where drunkenness is sold and harboured?
Our garments also should be referred to the licensing of some more
sober workmasters to see them cut into a less wanton garb. Who
shall regulate all the mixed conversation of our youth, male and
female together, as is the fashion of this country? Who shall
still appoint what shall be discoursed, what presumed, and no
further? Lastly, who shall forbid and separate all idle resort,
all evil company? These things will be, and must be; but how they
shall be least hurtful, how least enticing, herein consists the
grave and governing wisdom of a state.

To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities,
which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but
to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God
hath placed us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of books
will do this, which necessarily pulls along with it so many other
kinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary,
and yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining,
laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, which
Plato there mentions as the bonds and ligaments of the
commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every written
statute; these they be which will bear chief sway in such matters
as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and
remissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here
the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint
and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were
to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were
virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing,
what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be that
complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress;
foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to
choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere
artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We
ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is
of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking
object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein
the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore
did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but
that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?

They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to
remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is
a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though
some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it
cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when
this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a
covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannot
bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut
up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in
any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not hither so;
such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of
this point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how
much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the
matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them
both alike.

This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command
us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even
to a profuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can
wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a
rigour contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or
scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the
trial of virtue and the exercise of truth? It would be better
done, to learn that the law must needs be frivolous, which goes to
restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to
evil. And were I the chooser, a dream of well-doing should be
preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-
doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one
virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.

And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking,
travelling, or conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is of
the same effect that writings are, yet grant the thing to be
prohibited were only books, it appears that this Order hitherto is
far insufficient to the end which it intends. Do we not see, not
once or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against the
Parliament and City, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, and
dispersed among us, for all that licensing can do? Yet this is the
prime service a man would think, wherein this Order should give
proof of itself. If it were executed, you'll say. But certain, if
execution be remiss or blindfold now, and in this particular, what
will it be hereafter and in other books? If then the Order shall
not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords and Commons,
ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed books
already printed and divulged; after ye have drawn them up into a
list, that all may know which are condemned, and which not; and
ordain that no foreign books be delivered out of custody, till they
have been read over. This office will require the whole time of
not a few overseers, and those no vulgar men. There be also books
which are partly useful and excellent, partly culpable and
pernicious; this work will ask as many more officials, to make
expurgations and expunctions, that the commonwealth of learning be
not damnified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upon
their hands, ye must be fain to catalogue all those printers who
are found frequently offending, and forbid the importation of their
whole suspected typography. In a word, that this your Order may be
exact and not deficient, ye must reform it perfectly according to
the model of Trent and Seville, which I know ye abhor to do.

Yet though ye should condescend to this, which God forbid, the
Order still would be but fruitless and defective to that end
whereto ye meant it. If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so
unread or so uncatechized in story, that hath not heard of many
sects refusing books as a hindrance, and preserving their doctrine
unmixed for many ages, only by unwritten traditions? The Christian
faith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown to have spread
all over Asia, ere any Gospel or Epistle was seen in writing. If
the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain,
whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, the
wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hath
been executed upon books.

Another reason, whereby to make it plain that this Order will
miss the end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be in
every licenser. It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge
to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted
into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common
measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else
no mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not; which
is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behooves him,
there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a
greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the
perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge
volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain
seasons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and
in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any
time in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believe
how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a
sensible nostril, should be able to endure. In this one thing I
crave leave of the present licensers to be pardoned for so
thinking; who doubtless took this office up, looking on it through
their obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all
things seem easy and unlaborious to them; but that this short trial
hath wearied them out already, their own expressions and excuses to
them who make so many journeys to solicit their licence are
testimony enough. Seeing therefore those who now possess the
employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it; and
that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own
hours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put
himself to the salary of a press corrector; we may easily foresee
what kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant,
imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary. This is what I had to
show, wherein this Order cannot conduce to that end whereof it
bears the intention.

I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt
it causes, in being first the greatest discouragement and affront
that can be offered to learning, and to learned men.

It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every
least breath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more
equally Church revenues, that then all learning would be for ever
dashed and discouraged. But as for that opinion, I never found
cause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell with
the clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy
speech of any churchman who had a competency left him. If
therefore ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the
mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and
ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love
learning for itself, not for lucre or any other end but the service
of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity
of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward
of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind; then
know that, so far to distrust the judgment and the honesty of one
who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended,
as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and
examiner, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption,
is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing
spirit that can be put upon him.

What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at
school, if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue
of an Imprimatur; if serious and elaborate writings, as if they
were no more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue,
must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and
extemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted with his own
actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the
hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself
reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a
fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up
all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches,
meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his
judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be
informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him.
If, in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness,
no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring
him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and
suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his
midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view
of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps his
inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of
bookwriting, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in
print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the
back of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or
seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author,
to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning.

And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy, as to
have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after
licensing, while the book is yet under the press, which not seldom
happens to the best and diligentest writers; and that perhaps a
dozen times in one book? The printer dares not go beyond his
licensed copy; so often then must the author trudge to his leave-
giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a
jaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man,
can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the
press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author
lose his accuratest thoughts, and send the book forth worse than he
had made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy
and vexation that can befall.

And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of
teaching; how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or
else had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers,
is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal
licenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the
hidebound humour which he calls his judgment? When every acute
reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be ready
with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him:
I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me
under the wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the
licenser, but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who
shall warrant me his judgment? The State, sir, replies the
stationer, but has a quick return: The State shall be my governors,
but not my critics; they may be mistaken in the choice of a
licenser, as easily as this licenser may be mistaken in an author;
this is some common stuff; and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon,
THAT SUCH AUTHORIZED BOOKS ARE BUT THE LANGUAGE OF THE TIMES.
For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more than
ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession,
yet his very office and his commission enjoins him to let pass
nothing but what is vulgarly received already.

Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased
author, though never so famous in his lifetime and even to this
day, come to their hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted,
if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge,
uttered in the height of zeal (and who knows whether it might not
be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet not suiting with every low
decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the
reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him
their dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be
lost, for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a
perfunctory licenser. And to what an author this violence hath
been lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to be
faithfully published, I could now instance, but shall forbear till
a more convenient season.

Yet if these things be not resented seriously and timely by them
who have the remedy in their power, but that such iron-moulds as
these shall have authority to gnaw out the choicest periods of
exquisitest books, and to commit such a treacherous fraud against
the orphan remainders of worthiest men after death, the more sorrow
will belong to that hapless race of men, whose misfortune it is to
have understanding. Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care
to be more than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to be
ignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the
only pleasant life, and only in request.

And it is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive,
and most injurious to the written labours and monuments of the
dead, so to me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole
nation. I cannot set so light by all the invention, the art, the
wit, the grave and solid judgment which is in England, as that it
can be comprehended in any twenty capacities how good soever, much
less that it should not pass except their superintendence be over
it, except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that it
should be uncurrent without their manual stamp. Truth and
understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in
by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make
a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and
licence it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks. What is it but
a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed
the sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair
from all quarters to twenty licensing forges? Had anyone written
and divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest life,
misusing and forfeiting the esteem had of his reason among men, if
after conviction this only censure were adjudged him that he should
never henceforth write but what were first examined by an appointed
officer, whose hand should be annexed to pass his credit for him
that now he might be safely read; it could not be apprehended less
than a disgraceful punishment. Whence to include the whole nation,
and those that never yet thus offended, under such a diffident and
suspectful prohibition, may plainly be understood what a
disparagement it is. So much the more, whenas debtors and
delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unoffensive books
must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title.

Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we be
so jealous over them, as that we dare not trust them with an
English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vicious,
and ungrounded people; in such a sick and weak state of faith and
discretion, as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe
of a licenser? That this is care or love of them, we cannot
pretend, whenas, in those popish places where the laity are most
hated and despised, the same strictness is used over them. Wisdom
we cannot call it, because it stops but one breach of licence, nor
that neither: whenas those corruptions, which it seeks to prevent,
break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut.

And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our ministers
also, of whose labours we should hope better, and of the
proficiency which their flock reaps by them, than that after all
this light of the Gospel which is, and is to be, and all this
continual preaching, they should still be frequented with such an
unprincipled, unedified and laic rabble, as that the whiff of every
new pamphlet should stagger them out of their catechism and
Christian walking. This may have much reason to discourage the
ministers when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations,
and the benefiting of their hearers, as that they are not thought
fit to be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser;
that all the sermons, all the lectures preached, printed, vented in
such numbers, and such volumes, as have now well nigh made all
other books unsaleable, should not be armour enough against one
single Enchiridion, without the castle of St. Angelo of an
Imprimatur.

And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these
arguments of learned men's discouragement at this your Order are
mere flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen and
heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition
tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for that
honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of
philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves
did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning
amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the
glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now
these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I
found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the
Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the
Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that
England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke,
nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other
nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my
hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should
be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten
by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. When
that was once begun, it was as little in my fear that what words of
complaint I heard among learned men of other parts uttered against
the Inquisition, the same I should hear by as learned men at home,
uttered in time of Parliament against an order of licensing; and
that so generally that, when I had disclosed myself a companion of
their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an
honest quaestorship had endeared to the Sicilians was not more by
them importuned against Verres, than the favourable opinion which
I had among many who honour ye, and are known and respected by ye,
loaded me with entreaties and persuasions, that I would not despair
to lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind,
toward the removal of an undeserved thraldom upon learning. That
this is not therefore the disburdening of a particular fancy, but
the common grievance of all those who had prepared their minds and
studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, and from
others to entertain it, thus much may satisfy.

And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what
the general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again and
licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so
suspicious of all men, as to fear each book and the shaking of
every leaf, before we know what the contents are; if some who but
of late were little better than silenced from preaching shall come
now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot
be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over
learning: and will soon put it out of controversy, that bishops and
presbyters are the same to us, both name and thing. That those
evils of prelaty, which before from five or six and twenty sees
were distributively charged upon the whole people, will now light
wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us: whenas now the pastor
of a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be exalted
archbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but
keep his other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late
cried down the sole ordination of every novice Bachelor of Art, and
denied sole jurisdiction over the simplest parishioner, shall now
at home in his private chair assume both these over worthiest and
excellentest books and ablest authors that write them.

This is not, ye Covenants and Protestations that we have made!
this is not to put down prelaty; this is but to chop an episcopacy;
this is but to translate the Palace Metropolitan from one kind of
dominion into another; this is but an old canonical sleight of
commuting our penance. To startle thus betimes at a mere
unlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of every
conventicle, and a while after will make a conventicle of every
Christian meeting. But I am certain that a State governed by the
rules of justice and fortitude, or a Church built and founded upon
the rock of faith and true knowledge, cannot be so pusillanimous.
While things are yet not constituted in religion, that freedom of
writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the
prelates and learnt by them from the Inquisition, to shut us up all
again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubt
and discouragement to all learned and religious men.

Who cannot but discern the fineness of this politic drift, and
who are the contrivers; that while bishops were to be baited down,
then all presses might be open; it was the people's birthright and
privilege in time of Parliament, it was the breaking forth of
light. But now, the bishops abrogated and voided out of the
Church, as if our Reformation sought no more but to make room for
others into their seats under another name, the episcopal arts
begin to bud again, the cruse of truth must run no more oil,
liberty of printing must be enthralled again under a prelatical
commission of twenty, the privilege of the people nullified, and,
which is worse, the freedom of learning must groan again, and to
her old fetters: all this the Parliament yet sitting. Although
their own late arguments and defences against the prelates might
remember them, that this obstructing violence meets for the most
part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at:
instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and
invests them with a reputation. The punishing of wits enhances
their authority, saith the Viscount St. Albans; and a forbidden
writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in
the faces of them who seek to tread it out. This Order,
therefore, may prove a nursing-mother to sects, but I shall easily
show how it will be a step-dame to Truth: and first by disenabling
us to the maintenance of what is known already.

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge
thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is
compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow
not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of
conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and
if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the
Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his
belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.

There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to
another than the charge and care of their religion. There be--who
knows not that there be?--of Protestants and professors who live
and die in as arrant an implicit faith as any lay Papist of
Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his
profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so
many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to
keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? fain he
would have the name to be religious, fain he would bear up with his
neighbours in that. What does he therefore, but resolves to give
over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care
and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious
affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him
he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all
the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very
person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him
a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that
a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is
become a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him, according
as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him
gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night,
prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises,
is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced brewage, and
better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly
fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks
abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop
trading all day without his religion.

Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shall
be ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but
what passes through the custom-house of certain publicans that have
the tonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will
straight give themselves up into your hands, make 'em and cut 'em
out what religion ye please: there be delights, there be
recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from
sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream.
What need they torture their heads with that which others have
taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own purveying?
These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our
knowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly and how to
be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine
conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and
solid piece of framework, as any January could freeze together.

Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergy
themselves. It is no new thing never heard of before, for a
parochial minister, who has his reward and is at his Hercules'
pillars in a warm benefice, to be easily inclinable, if he have
nothing else that may rouse up his studies, to finish his circuit
in an English Concordance and a topic folio, the gatherings and
savings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony and a Catena; treading
the constant round of certain common doctrinal heads, attended with
their uses, motives, marks, and means, out of which, as out of an
alphabet, or sol-fa, by forming and transforming, joining and
disjoining variously, a little bookcraft, and two hours'
meditation, might furnish him unspeakably to the performance of
more than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to reckon up the
infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other
loitering gear. But as for the multitude of sermons ready printed
and piled up, on every text that is not difficult, our London
trading St. Thomas in his vestry, and add to boot St. Martin and
St. Hugh, have not within their hallowed limits more vendible ware
of all sorts ready made: so that penury he never need fear of
pulpit provision, having where so plenteously to refresh his
magazine. But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his back
door be not secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold book may
now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his old
collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep
waking, to stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about
his received opinions, to walk the round and counter-round with his
fellow inspectors, fearing lest any of his flock be seduced, who
also then would be better instructed, better exercised and
disciplined. And God send that the fear of this diligence, which
must then be used, do not make us affect the laziness of a
licensing Church.

For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth
guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own
weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and
irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man
judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good
as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house
to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to
the world what his opinion is, what his reasons, and wherefore that
which is now thought cannot be sound? Christ urged it as wherewith
to justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing is more
public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be,
there being so many whose business and profession merely it is to
be the champions of truth; which if they neglect, what can be
imputed but their sloth, or unability?

Thus much we are hindered and disinured by this course of
licensing, toward the true knowledge of what we seem to know. For
how much it hurts and hinders the licensers themselves in the
calling of their ministry, more than any secular employment, if
they will discharge that office as they ought, so that of necessity
they must neglect either the one duty or the other, I insist not,
because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience,
how they will decide it there.

There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the
incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us
to; more than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens
and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our
richest merchandise, truth; nay, it was first established and put
in practice by Antichristian malice and mystery on set purpose to
extinguish, if it were possible, the light of Reformation, and to
settle falsehood; little differing from that policy wherewith the
Turk upholds his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing. 'Tis not
denied, but gladly confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to
Heaven louder than most of nations, for that great measure of truth
which we enjoy, especially in those main points between us and the
Pope, with his appurtenances the prelates: but he who thinks we are
to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of
reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show
us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion
declares that he is yet far short of truth.

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and
was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended,
and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a
wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian
Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris,
took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand
pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever
since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating
the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris,
went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could
find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor
ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring
together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an
immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these
licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity,
forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue
to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.

We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself,
it smites us into darkness. Who can discern those planets that are
oft combust, and those stars of brightest magnitude that rise and
set with the sun, until the opposite motion of their orbs bring
them to such a place in the firmament, where they may be seen
evening or morning? The light which we have gained was given us,
not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more
remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest,
the unmitring of a bishop, and the removing him from off the
presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy nation. No, if
other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both
economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have
looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath
beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be who
perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a
calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own
pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will
hear with meekness, nor can convince; yet all must be suppressed
which is not found in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they
are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to
unite those dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body of
Truth. To be still searching what we know not by what we know,
still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is
homogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in theology
as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a
Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and
inwardly divided minds.

Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof
ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and
dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to
invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of
any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore
the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so
ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and
ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of
Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old
philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius
Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural
wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is
it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out
yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond
the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to
learn our language and our theologic arts.

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of
Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner
propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation
chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be
proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of
Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate
perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable
spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator,
perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name of
Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming
all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our
obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are
become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars, of whom
God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once again by all
concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and
devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God
is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even
to the reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then but
reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his
Englishmen? I say, as his manner is, first to us, though we mark
not the method of his counsels, and are unworthy.

Behold now this vast city: a city of refuge, the mansion house of
liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop
of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion
out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of
beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by
their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and
ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty,
the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What
could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to
seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and
pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing
people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon
more than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks;
had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be
much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men
is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of
sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after
knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city.
What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather
praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-
deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A
little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and
some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and
unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but
forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and
Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not,
if some great and worthy stranger should come among us, wise to
discern the mould and temper of a people, and how to govern it,
observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our
extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and
freedom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the
Roman docility and courage: If such were my Epirots, I would not
despair the greatest design that could be attempted, to make a
Church or kingdom happy.

Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and
sectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some
cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there
should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there
must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in
the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every
stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a
continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can
every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the
perfection consists in this, that, out of many moderate varieties
and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional,
arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole
pile and structure.

Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in
spiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected. For
now the time seems come, wherein Moses the great prophet may sit in
heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his
fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord's
people, are become prophets. No marvel then though some men, and
some good men too perhaps, but young in goodness, as Joshua then
was, envy them. They fret, and out of their own weakness are in
agony, lest these divisions and subdivisions will undo us. The
adversary again applauds, and waits the hour: when they have
branched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties and
partitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm
root, out of which we all grow, though into branches: nor will
beware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through at
every angle of his ill-united and unwieldy brigade. And that we
are to hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, and
that we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps, though
over-timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in
the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have
these reasons to persuade me.

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked
about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round,
defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her
walls and suburb trenches, that then the people, or the greater
part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of
highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be
disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a
rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of,
argues first a singular goodwill, contentedness and confidence in
your prudent foresight and safe government, Lords and Commons; and
from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded
contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as
great spirits among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh besieged
by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at no
cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.

Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success
and victory. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the
spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital but to rational
faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of
wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution
the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly
up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom
and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and
sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us
not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the
old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax
young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous
virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter
ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her
invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty
youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam;
purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself
of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and
flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter
about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would
prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.

What would ye do then? should ye suppress all this flowery crop
of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in
this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over
it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know
nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it,
Lords and Commons, they who counsel ye to such a suppressing do as
good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. If
it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing
and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own
mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and
Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased
us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that
which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence
of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and
lifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves.

Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly
pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made
us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We
can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found
us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be,
oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have
freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts
more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest
things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot
suppress that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law,
that fathers may dispatch at will their own children. And who
shall then stick closest to ye, and excite others? not he who takes
up arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of Danegelt.
Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet love
my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all
liberties.

What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful and
so unequal to suppress opinions for the newness or the
unsuitableness to a customary acceptance, will not be my task to
say. I only shall repeat what I have learned from one of your own
honourable number, a right noble and pious lord, who, had he not
sacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church and Commonwealth, we
had not now missed and bewailed a worthy and undoubted patron of
this argument. Ye know him, I am sure; yet I for honour's sake,
and may it be eternal to him, shall name him, the Lord Brook. He
writing of episcopacy, and by the way treating of sects and
schisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of his
dying charge, which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard
with ye, so full of meekness and breathing charity, that next to
his last testament, who bequeathed love and peace to his disciples,
I cannot call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild
and peaceful. He there exhorts us to hear with patience and
humility those, however they be miscalled, that desire to live
purely, in such a use of God's ordinances, as the best guidance of
their conscience gives them, and to tolerate them, though in some
disconformity to ourselves. The book itself will tell us more at
large, being published to the world, and dedicated to the
Parliament by him who, both for his life and for his death,
deserves that what advice he left be not laid by without perusal.

And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speak
what may help to the further discussing of matters in agitation.
The temple of Janus with his two controversial faces might now not
unsignificantly be set open. And though all the winds of doctrine
were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we
do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her
strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put
to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the
best and surest suppressing. He who hears what praying there is
for light and clearer knowledge to be sent down among us, would
think of other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of
Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. Yet when the
new light which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy and
oppose, if it come not first in at their casements. What a
collusion is this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man to use
diligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early and
late, that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by
statute? When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the
deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all
their equipage: drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged:
scattered and defeated all objections in his way; calls out his
adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun,
if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument:
for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a
narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though
it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice
in the wars of Truth.

For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty?
She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her
victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses
against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she
sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who
spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rather
she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps
tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab,
until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it not
impossible that she may have more shapes than one. What else is
all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this
side or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but a
vain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that
hand-writing nailed to the cross? What great purchase is this
Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is,
that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not, may
do either to the Lord. How many other things might be tolerated in
peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not
the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one
another?

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a
slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet
haunts us. We stumble and are impatient at the least dividing of
one visible congregation from another, though it be not in
fundamentals; and through our forwardness to suppress, and our
backwardness to recover any enthralled piece of truth out of the
gripe of custom, we care not to keep truth separated from truth,
which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We do not see
that, while we still affect by all means a rigid external
formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming
stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and
stubble, forced and frozen together, which is more to the sudden
degenerating of a Church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.

Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all
in a Church is to be expected gold and silver and precious
stones: it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the
tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the Angels'
ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of one
mind--as who looks they should be?--this doubtless is more
wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be
tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery,
and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and
civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first
that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and
regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil
absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly
permit, that intends not to unlaw itself: but those neighbouring
differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whether
in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which, though they may
be many, yet need not interrupt THE UNITY OF SPIRIT, if we
could but find among us THE BOND OF PEACE.

In the meanwhile if any one would write, and bring his helpful
hand to the slow-moving Reformation which we labour under, if Truth
have spoken to him before others, or but seemed at least to speak,
who hath so bejesuited us that we should trouble that man with
asking license to do so worthy a deed? and not consider this, that
if it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be
prohibited than truth itself; whose first appearance to our eyes,
bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and
unplausible than many errors, even as the person is of many a great
man slight and contemptuous to see to. And what do they tell us
vainly of new opinions, when this very opinion of theirs, that none
must be heard but whom they like, is the worst and newest opinion
of all others; and is the chief cause why sects and schisms do so
much abound, and true knowledge is kept at distance from us;
besides yet a greater danger which is in it.

For when God shakes a kingdom with strong and healthful
commotions to a general reforming, 'tis not untrue that many
sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing; but yet
more true it is, that God then raises to his own work men of rare
abilities, and more than common industry, not only to look back and
revise what hath been taught heretofore, but to gain further and go
on some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth. For such
is the order of God's enlightening his Church, to dispense and deal
out by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustain
it.

Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what
place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees
not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote
ourselves again to set places, and assemblies, and outward callings
of men; planting our faith one while in the old Convocation house,
and another while in the Chapel at Westminster; when all the faith
and religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient
without plain convincement, and the charity of patient instruction
to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest
Christian, who desires to walk in the Spirit, and not in the letter
of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there
made; no, though Harry VII himself there, with all his liege tombs
about him, should lend them voices from the dead, to swell their
number.

And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading
schismatics, what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and
distrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentle
meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the
matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for
their sakes, yet for our own? seeing no man who hath tasted
learning, but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who,
not contented with stale receipts, are able to manage and set forth
new positions to the world. And were they but as the dust and
cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may yet serve
to polish and brighten the armoury of Truth, even for that respect
they were not utterly to be cast away. But if they be of those
whom God hath fitted for the special use of these times with
eminent and ample gifts, and those perhaps neither among the
priests nor among the Pharisees, and we in the haste of a
precipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop
their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous
opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them; no
less than woe to us, while, thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we
are found the persecutors.

There have been not a few since the beginning of this Parliament,
both of the presbytery and others, who by their unlicensed books,
to the contempt of an Imprimatur, first broke that triple ice clung
about our hearts, and taught the people to see day: I hope that
none of those were the persuaders to renew upon us this bondage
which they themselves have wrought so much good by contemning. But
if neither the check that Moses gave to young Joshua, nor the
countermand which our Saviour gave to young John, who was so ready
to prohibit those whom he thought unlicensed, be not enough to
admonish our elders how unacceptable to God their testy mood of
prohibiting is; if neither their own remembrance what evil hath
abounded in the Church by this set of licensing, and what good they
themselves have begun by transgressing it, be not enough, but that
they will persuade and execute the most Dominican part of the
Inquisition over us, and are already with one foot in the stirrup
so active at suppressing, it would be no unequal distribution in
the first place to suppress the suppressors themselves: whom the
change of their condition hath puffed up, more than their late
experience of harder times hath made wise.

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the
honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that
Order published next before this, "that no book be printed, unless
the printer's and the author's name, or at least the printer's, be
registered." Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found
mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the
timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention can
use. For this authentic Spanish policy of licensing books, if I
have said aught, will prove the most unlicensed book itself within
a short while; and was the immediate image of a Star Chamber decree
to that purpose made in those very times when that Court did the
rest of those her pious works, for which she is now fallen from the
stars with Lucifer. Whereby ye may guess what kind of state
prudence, what love of the people, what care of religion or good
manners there was at the contriving, although with singular
hypocrisy it pretended to bind books to their good behaviour. And
how it got the upper hand of your precedent Order so well
constituted before, if we may believe those men whose profession
gives them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there was in it
the fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of
bookselling; who under pretence of the poor in their Company not to
be defrauded, and the just retaining of each man his several copy,
which God forbid should be gainsaid, brought divers glossing
colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving to
no end except it be to exercise a superiority over their
neighbours; men who do not therefore labour in an honest profession
to which learning is indebted, that they should be made other men's
vassals. Another end is thought was aimed at by some of them in
procuring by petition this Order, that, having power in their
hands, malignant books might the easier scape abroad, as the event
shows.

But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not.
This I know, that errors in a good government and in a bad are
equally almost incident; for what magistrate may not be
misinformed, and much the sooner, if liberty of printing be reduced
into the power of a few? But to redress willingly and speedily
what hath been erred, and in highest authority to esteem a plain
advertisement more than others have done a sumptuous bride, is a
virtue (honoured Lords and Commons) answerable to your highest actions,
and whereof none can participate but greatest and wisest men.





 


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