AREOPAGITICA

By John Milton

A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING

TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND

This is true liberty, when free-born men,

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

Euripid. Hicetid.

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

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

Nevertheless there being three principal things, without which all praising is but
courtship and flattery: First, when that only is praised which is solidly worth
praise: next, when greatest likelihoods are brought that such things are truly and
really in those persons to whom they are ascribed: the other, when he who praises,
by showing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate
that he flatters not; the former two of these I have heretofore endeavoured,
rescuing the employment from him who went about to impair your merits with a
trivial and malignant encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine own
acquittal, that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath been reserved
opportunely to this occasion.
For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as
freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity; and
that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on your proceedings. His highest
praising is not flattery, and his plainest advice is a kind of praising. For though
I should affirm and hold by argument, that it would fare better with truth, with
learning and the Commonwealth, if one of your published Orders, which I should
name, were called in; yet at the same time it could not but much redound to the
lustre of your mild and equal government, whenas private persons are hereby
animated to think ye better pleased with public advice, than other statists have
been delighted heretofore with public flattery. And men will then see what
difference there is between the magnanimity of a triennial Parliament, and that
jealous haughtiness of prelates and cabin counsellors that usurped of late, whenas
they shall observe ye in the midst of your victories and successes more gently
brooking written exceptions against a voted Order than other courts, which had
produced nothing worth memory but the weak ostentation of wealth, would have
endured the least signified dislike at any sudden proclamation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose discipline in this point I
do not find to have been more severe than what was formerly in practice. The books
of those whom they took to be grand heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned
in the general Councils; and not till then were prohibited, or burnt, by authority
of the emperor. As for the writings of heathen authors, unless they were plain
invectives against Christianity, as those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with
no interdict that can be cited, till about the year 400, in a Carthaginian Council,
wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books of Gentiles, but heresies
they might read: while others long before them, on the contrary, scrupled more the
books of heretics than of Gentiles. And that the primitive Councils and bishops
were wont only to declare what books were not commendable, passing no further, but
leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to lay by, till after the year 800,
is observed already by Padre Paolo, the great unmasker of the Trentine Council.
After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of political rule
into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before
over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to be read what they fancied not; yet
sparing in their censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with: till
Martin V., by his bull, not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated
the reading of heretical books; for about that time Wickliffe and Huss, growing
terrible, were they who first drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of
prohibiting. Which course Leo X. and his successors followed, until the Council of
Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth, or perfected,
those Catalogues and expurging Indexes, that rake through the entrails of many an
old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor
did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate,
they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory
of an index.

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

Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present

work be contained aught that may withstand the printing.

VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence.

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

NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence.

Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this

present work of Davanzati may be printed.

VINCENT RABBATTA, etc.

It may be printed, July 15.

FRIAR SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA,

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

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

Holy Palace.

BELCASTRO, Vicegerent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a vision recorded by

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

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

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

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

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

But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usually reckoned. First, is
feared the infection that may spread; but then all human learning and controversy
in religious points must remove out of the world, yea the Bible itself; for that
ofttimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnal sense of wicked men
not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence
through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other great disputes it answers dubiously
and darkly to the common reader. And ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his
marginal Keri, that Moses and all the prophets cannot persuade him to pronounce the
textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know the Bible itself put by the Papist 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
easier and shorter than an Indian voyage, though it could be sailed either by the
north of Cataio eastward, or of Canada westward, while our Spanish licensing gags
the English press never so severely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all

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

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

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

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

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

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

And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or

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

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

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

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

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

What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our ministers also, of whose

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

And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these arguments of
learned men's discouragement at this your Order are mere flourishes, and not real,
I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries, where this kind of
inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I
had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as
they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile
condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had
damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these
many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the
famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy
otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew
that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I
took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded of
her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in
her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be
forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. When that was
once begun, it was as little in my fear that what words of complaint I heard among
learned men of other parts uttered against the Inquisition, the same I should hear
by as learned men at home, uttered in time of Parliament against an order of
licensing; and that so generally that, when I had disclosed myself a companion of
their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an honest quaestorship
had endeared to the Sicilians was not more by them importuned against Verres, than
the favourable opinion which I had among many who honour ye, and are known and
respected by ye, loaded me with entreaties and persuasions, that I would not
despair to lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind, toward
the removal of an undeserved thraldom upon learning. That this is not therefore the
disburdening of a particular fancy, but the common grievance of all those who had
prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others,
and from others to entertain it, thus much may satisfy.
And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the general
murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again and licensing, and that we are
so timorous of ourselves, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book and
the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are; if some who but of
late were little better than silenced from preaching shall come now to silence us
from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guessed what is intended by
some but a second tyranny over learning: and will soon put it out of controversy,
that bishops and presbyters are the same to us, both name and thing. That those
evils of prelaty, which before from five or six and twenty sees were distributively
charged upon the whole people, will now light wholly upon learning, is not obscure
to us: whenas now the pastor of a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be
exalted archbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but keep his
other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late cried down the sole
ordination of every novice Bachelor of Art, and denied sole jurisdiction over the
simplest parishioner, shall now at home in his private chair assume both these over
worthiest and excellentest books and ablest authors that write them.

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

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

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

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

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

Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergy themselves. It is no
new thing never heard of before, for a parochial minister, who has his reward and
is at his Hercules' pillars in a warm benefice, to be easily inclinable, if he have
nothing else that may rouse up his studies, to finish his circuit in an English
Concordance and a topic folio, the gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship,
a Harmony and a Catena; treading the constant round of certain common doctrinal
heads, attended with their uses, motives, marks, and means, out of which, as out of
an alphabet, or sol-fa, by forming and transforming, joining and disjoining
variously, a little bookcraft, and two hours' meditation, might furnish him
unspeakably to the performance of more than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to
reckon up the infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other
loitering gear. But as for the multitude of sermons ready printed and piled up, on
every text that is not difficult, our London trading St. Thomas in his vestry, and
add to boot St. Martin and St. Hugh, have not within their hallowed limits more
vendible ware of all sorts ready made: so that penury he never need fear of pulpit
provision, having where so plenteously to refresh his magazine. But if his rear and
flanks be not impaled, if his back door be not secured by the rigid licenser, but
that a bold book may now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his
old collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to
stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about his received opinions, to
walk the round and counter-round with his fellow inspectors, fearing lest any of
his flock be seduced, who also then would be better instructed, better exercised
and disciplined. And God send that the fear of this diligence, which must then be
used, do not make us affect the laziness of a licensing Church.
For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which
becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and
the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than
when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as
theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is
more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world what his opinion is,
what his reasons, and wherefore that which is now thought cannot be sound? Christ
urged it as wherewith to justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing
is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be, there being
so many whose business and profession merely it is to be the champions of truth;
which if they neglect, what can be imputed but their sloth, or unability?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold now this vast city: a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty,
encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more
anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed
justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there,
sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas
wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching
Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of
reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and
so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant
soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of
prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to
harvest; there need not be five weeks; had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are
white already.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much
writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous
thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city.
What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious
forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into
their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one
another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and
unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forgo this
prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into
canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should
come among us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and how to govern
it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended
thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would
cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage: If such were my
Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that could be attempted, to make a
Church or kingdom happy.

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

Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual architecture,

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

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, her navigable
river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumoured to
be marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches, that then the people, or the
greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest
and most important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading,
inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before
discoursed or written of, argues first a singular goodwill, contentedness and
confidence in your prudent foresight and safe government, Lords and Commons; and
from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded contempt of their
enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as his was,
who when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece
of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.
Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory. For as
in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to
vital but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest
operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the
body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has
not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to
bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it
betokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old
and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again,
entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great
and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible
locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her
undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight
at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and
flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at
what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and
schisms.

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

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

What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful and so unequal to

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

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

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

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our
necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us. We stumble and are impatient at
the least dividing of one visible congregation from another, though it be not in
fundamentals; and through our forwardness to suppress, and our backwardness to
recover any enthralled piece of truth out of the gripe of custom, we care not to
keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We
do not see that, while we still affect by all means a rigid external formality, we
may as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead
congealment of wood and hay and stubble, forced and frozen together, which is more
to the sudden degenerating of a Church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.
Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in a Church is to
be expected gold and silver and precious stones: it is not possible for man to
sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the
Angels' ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as
who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more
Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated
popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil
supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and
compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also
which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can
possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself: but those neighbouring
differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whether in some point of
doctrine or of discipline, which, though they may be many, yet need not interrupt
THE UNITY OF SPIRIT, if we could but find among us THE BOND OF PEACE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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