textfiles/etext/AUTHORS/MILTON/milton-areopagitica-518.txt

                                      1644

                                  AREOPAGITICA

                                 by John Milton
AREOPAGITICA

                          AREOPAGITICA

        Analysis of the Order of Parliament (June 14, 1643),

             Against which the Areopagitica was Directed

  1. The Preamble recounts that "many false...scandalous, seditious,
and libellous" works have lately been published, "to the great
defamation of Religion and government"; that many private
printing-presses have been set up; and that "divers of the Stationers'
Company" have infringed on the rights of the Company.

  2. "It is therefore ordered by the Lords and Commons in Parliament,"
(1) that no Order "of both or either House shall be printed" except by
command; (2) that no Book, etc., "shall from henceforth be printed
or put to sale, unless the same be first approved of and licensed by
such person or persons as both or either of the said Houses shall
appoint for the licensing of the same"; (3) that no book, of which the
copyright has been granted to the Company, "for their relief and the
maintenance of their poor," be printed by any person or persons
"without the license and consent of the Master, Warden, and assistants
of the said Company"; (4) that no book, "formerly printed here," be
imported from beyond seas, "upon pain of forfeiting the same to the
Owner" of the Copyright, "and such further punishment as shall be
thought fit."

  3. The Stationers' Company and the officers of the two Houses are
authorised to search for unlicensed Presses, and to break them up;
to search for unlicensed Books, etc., and confiscate them; and to
"apprehend all authors, printers and others" concerned in publishing
unlicensed books and to bring them before the Houses "or the Committee
of Examination" for "further punishments," such persons not to be
released till they have given satisfaction and also "sufficient
caution not to offend in like sort for the future."

  4. "All justices of the Peace, Captains, Constables and other
officers" are ordered to give aid in the execution of the above.

        A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING,

             TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND (1644)

  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
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 loyalist 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 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
democraty 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 worse 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 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 loth 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 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 licence, 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 agreed 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 them; for they disliked all but their own
laconic apothegms, 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 what 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 all 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 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 Cini, 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 romanising, 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 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 bells 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 minorities 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 be 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
foreborne 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 alchymy 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 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 first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for
scurril Plautus, 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, loth
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 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 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 fill 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
wayfaring 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 into the first rank of prohibited books. The ancientest
fathers 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 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 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 not 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 an 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 recreations 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 thither 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 commands
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
learnthat 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 dram 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
uncatechised 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 behoves 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
would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an imposition 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 loth to dishearten heartily 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 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 temporising and extemporising
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 far 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 authorised 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 late 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 as 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 monopolised 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 tyrannises;
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 add 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 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," said 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 stepdame 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 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 resolve 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 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 the 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 it 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 proposed to lay open, the incredible
loss and detriment that this plot of incensing 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 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 learnour language and our
theologic arts.

  Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven,
we Pave 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 Huss 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 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-reputed 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 forego 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 if 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 be ware 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
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 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 despatch
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 wordly 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 We 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. 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 meantime 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 licence
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
contemptible 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 while in the old Convocation house, and another
while in the Chapel at Westminster; when all the faith and religion
that shall be there canonised 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 meeting
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
let of licensing, and what good in they themselves have begun by
transgressing it, be not enough, but that they will persuade and
execute the most Dominican part 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 enquire most, it may be
doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees and
monopolisers 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 glosing 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 bribe, is a virtue (honoured Lords and Commons) answerable
to your highest actions, and whereof none can participate but greatest
and wisest men.

                                    THE END
.