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      Areopagitica, by Milton
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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Areopagitica, by John Milton

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Title: Areopagitica
       A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The
              Parliament Of England

Author: John Milton

Release Date: January 21, 2006 [EBook #608]
Last Updated: February 6, 2013

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AREOPAGITICA ***




Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger





</pre>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      AREOPAGITICA
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      By John Milton
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <h3>
      A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING <br /> TO THE PARLIAMENT OF
      ENGLAND
    </h3>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     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.
</pre>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     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.
</pre>
<pre xml:space="preserve">

     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.
</pre>
<pre xml:space="preserve">

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

     VINCENT RABBATTA,  etc.
</pre>
<pre xml:space="preserve">

     It may be printed, July 15.

     FRIAR SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA,
     Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence.
</pre>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the
     Holy Palace.

     BELCASTRO,  Vicegerent.
</pre>
<pre xml:space="preserve">

     Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.
</pre>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
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?
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      '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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than
      the charge and care of their religion. There be&mdash;who knows not that
      there be?&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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?
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;as who looks they should be?&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <div style="height: 6em;">
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