AREOPAGITICA

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

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

 Euripid. Hicetid. 

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

Which though I stay not to confess ere any ask, I shall be blameless, ifit be no other than the joy and gratulation which it brings to all whowish and promote their country's liberty; whereof this whole discourseproposed will be a certain testimony, if not a trophy. For this is notthe liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arisein the Commonwealth--that let no man in this world expect; but whencomplaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men lookfor. To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shallutter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from sucha steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into ourprinciples as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will beattributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God ourdeliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom, Lordsand Commons of England. Neither is it in God's esteem the diminutionof his glory, when honourable things are spoken of good men and worthymagistrates; which if I now first should begin to do, after so fair aprogress of your laudable deeds, and such a long obligement upon thewhole realm to your indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckonedamong the tardiest, and the unwillingest of them that praise ye. 

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

For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not todeclare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenantof his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits onyour proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainestadvice is a kind of praising. For though I should affirm and hold byargument, that it would fare better with truth, with learning and theCommonwealth, if one of your published Orders, which I should name, werecalled in; yet at the same time it could not but much redound to thelustre of your mild and equal government, whenas private persons arehereby animated to think ye better pleased with public advice, thanother statists have been delighted heretofore with public flattery. Andmen will then see what difference there is between the magnanimity of atriennial Parliament, and that jealous haughtiness of prelates and cabincounsellors that usurped of late, whenas they shall observe ye in themidst of your victories and successes more gently brooking writtenexceptions against a voted Order than other courts, which had producednothing worth memory but the weak ostentation of wealth, would haveendured the least signified dislike at any sudden proclamation. 

If I should thus far presume upon the meek demeanour of your civil andgentle greatness, Lords and Commons, as what your published Order hathdirectly said, that to gainsay, I might defend myself with ease, if anyshould accuse me of being new or insolent, did they but know how muchbetter I find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity ofGreece, than the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. And out of those ages, to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that weare not yet Goths and Jutlanders, I could name him who from his privatehouse wrote that discourse to the Parliament of Athens, that persuadesthem to change the form of democracy which was then established. Suchhonour was done in those days to men who professed the study of wisdomand eloquence, not only in their own country, but in other lands, thatcities and signiories heard them gladly, and with great respect, if theyhad aught in public to admonish the state. Thus did Dion Prusaeus, astranger and a private orator, counsel the Rhodians against a formeredict; and I abound with other like examples, which to set here would besuperfluous. 

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

If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye were not, I knownot what should withhold me from presenting ye with a fit instancewherein to show both that love of truth which ye eminently profess, andthat uprightness of your judgment which is not wont to be partial toyourselves; by judging over again that Order which ye have ordained toregulate printing:--that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforthprinted, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such, or atleast one of such, as shall be thereto appointed. For that part whichpreserves 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 persecutehonest and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars. But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had died withhis brother quadragesimal and matrimonial when the prelates expired, Ishall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before ye, first theinventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to own; next what isto 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 besuppressed. Last, that it will be primely to the discouragement of alllearning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and bluntingour abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and croppingthe discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civilwisdom. 

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church andCommonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as wellas men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice onthem as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but docontain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whoseprogeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacyand extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know theyare as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon'steeth; 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 killa 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, killsthe image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burdento the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tistrue, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss;and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. 

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the livinglabours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preservedand stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thuscommitted, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the wholeimpression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in theslaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifthessence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather thana life. But lest I should be condemned of introducing license, while Ioppose licensing, I refuse not the pains to be so much historical, as will serve to show what hath been done by ancient and famouscommonwealths against this disorder, till the very time that thisproject of licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was catched up by ourprelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters. 

In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any other partof Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the magistratecared to take notice of; those either blasphemous and atheistical, orlibellous. Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopaguscommanded to be burnt, and himself banished the territory for adiscourse begun with his confessing not to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS, OR WHETHER NOT. And against defaming, it was decreed that none shouldbe traduced by name, as was the manner of Vetus Comoedia, whereby we mayguess how they censured libelling. And this course was quick enough, asCicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists, and the open way of defaming, as the event showed. Of other sects andopinions, though tending to voluptuousness, and the denying of divineProvidence, they took no heed. 

Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine schoolof Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questionedby the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those oldcomedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; andthat Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of themall, to his royal scholar Dionysius, is commonly known, and may beexcused, if holy Chrysostom, as is reported, nightly studied so much thesame author and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into thestyle of a rousing sermon. 

That other leading city of Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that Lycurgustheir lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been thefirst that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sentthe poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surlinesswith his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law andcivility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of booksamong them, for they disliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, andtook a slight occasion to chase Archilochus out of their city, perhapsfor composing in a higher strain than their own soldierly ballads androundels could reach to. Or if it were for his broad verses, they werenot therein so cautious but they were as dissolute in their promiscuousconversing; whence Euripides affirms in Andromache, that their womenwere all unchaste. Thus much may give us light after what sort of bookswere prohibited among the Greeks. 

The Romans also, for many ages trained up only to a military roughnessresembling most the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learning little butwhat their twelve Tables, and the Pontific College with their augursand flamens taught them in religion and law; so unacquainted with otherlearning, that when Carneades and Critolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes, coming ambassadors to Rome, took thereby occasion to give the city ataste of their philosophy, they were suspected for seducers by no lessa man than Cato the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss themspeedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipioand others of the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabineausterity; honoured and admired the men; and the censor himself atlast, in his old age, fell to the study of that whereof before he wasso scrupulous. And yet at the same time Naevius and Plautus, the firstLatin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowed scenes ofMenander and Philemon. Then began to be considered there also what wasto be done to libellous books and authors; for Naevius was quickly castinto prison for his unbridled pen, and released by the tribunes uponhis recantation; we read also that libels were burnt, and the makerspunished by Augustus. The like severity, no doubt, was used, if aughtwere impiously written against their esteemed gods. Except in these twopoints, how the world went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning. 

And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies his Epicurism toMemmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself disputes againstthat opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical sharpness ornaked plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by any orderprohibited. And for matters of state, the story of Titus Livius, thoughit extolled that part which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed byOctavius Caesar of the other faction. But that Naso was by him banishedin his old age, for the wanton poems of his youth, was but a mere covertof state over some secret cause: and besides, the books were neitherbanished nor called in. From hence we shall meet with little else buttyranny in the Roman empire, that we may not marvel, if not so often badas good books were silenced. I shall therefore deem to have been largeenough, in producing what among the ancients was punishable to write;save only which, all other arguments were free to treat on. 

By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose discipline inthis point I do not find to have been more severe than what was formerlyin practice. The books of those whom they took to be grand heretics wereexamined, refuted, and condemned in the general Councils; and not tillthen were prohibited, or burnt, by authority of the emperor. As for thewritings of heathen authors, unless they were plain invectives againstChristianity, as those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with nointerdict that can be cited, till about the year 400, in a CarthaginianCouncil, wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books ofGentiles, 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 declarewhat books were not commendable, passing no further, but leaving it toeach 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 TrentineCouncil. 

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

To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was toordain 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 threeglutton friars. For example:

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

 VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence. 

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

 NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence. 

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

 VINCENT RABBATTA, etc. 

 It may be printed, July 15. 

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

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

 Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the Holy Palace. 

 BELCASTRO, Vicegerent. 

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

Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the piazzaof one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with theirshaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity atthe foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge. Theseare the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that sobewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echothey 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 apishlyRomanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; asif the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink withoutLatin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthyto express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, forthat our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in theachievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow tospell such a dictatory presumption English. 

And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing rippedup and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that canbe heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by anystatute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the moderncustom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the mostanti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that everinquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the worldas any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than theissue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativityof any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, whodenies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that abook, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand beforea jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness thejudgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferrybackward into light, was never heard before, till that mysteriousiniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our booksalso within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morselso officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by ourinquisiturient 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, whenye were importuned the passing it, all men who know the integrity ofyour actions, and how ye honour truth, will clear ye readily. 

But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing forall that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no such deepinvention, but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and yet bestand wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborneto use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first whotook it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the firstapproach of Reformation; I am of those who believe it will be a harderalchemy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of suchan 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 itdeserves, for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one theproperties it has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded, whatis to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sort they be, andwhether be more the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds. 

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who wereskilful 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 intoHoly Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them atragedian; the question was notwithstanding sometimes controverted amongthe primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmedit both lawful and profitable; as was then evidently perceived, whenJulian the Apostate and subtlest enemy to our faith made a decreeforbidding Christians the study of heathen learning: for, said he, theywound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences theyovercome us. And indeed the Christians were put so to their shifts bythis 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 theseven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into diversforms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a newChristian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the providence ofGod provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his son, bytaking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. Sogreat an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning;and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying theChurch, than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian. 

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

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a visionrecorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerome, to thenun Eustochium, and, besides, has nothing of a fever in it. DionysiusAlexandrinus was about the year 240 a person of great name in the Churchfor piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much againstheretics by being conversant in their books; until a certain presbyterlaid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himselfamong those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself what was to be thought; whensuddenly 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 itwas answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians, PROVE ALLTHINGS, HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. And he might have added anotherremarkable 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 orevil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if thewill and conscience be not defiled. 

For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evilsubstance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said withoutexception, RISE, PETER, KILL AND EAT, leaving the choice to each man'sdiscretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little ornothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are notunappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed goodnourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference isof bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve inmany respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what better witness can ye expect I should produce, than one ofyour own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed inthis land, Mr. Selden; whose volume of natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasonsand theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yeaerrors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistancetoward the speedy attainment of what is truest. I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man's body, saving everthe rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left arbitrary thedieting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man mighthave to exercise his own leading capacity. 

How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the wholelife of man! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust, withoutparticular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grownman. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews from heaven, thatomer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to havebeen more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice asmany meals. For those actions which enter into a man, rather than issueout of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivate undera perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the giftof reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left forpreaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those thingswhich heretofore were governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us, that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; but neither he nor otherinspired author tells us that such or such reading is unlawful: yetcertainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much moreexpedient 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 wasa private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary imitation:the men in remorse burnt those books which were their own; themagistrate by this example is not appointed; these men practised thebooks, another might perhaps have read them in some sort usefully. 

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almostinseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwovenwith the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardlyto be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed uponPsyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were notmore intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that theknowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forthinto the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell intoof knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. Astherefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that canapprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is trulybetter, he is the true warfaring Christian. 

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised andunbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks outof the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not withoutdust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bringimpurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is bywhat is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in thecontemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises toher followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; herwhiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why oursage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a betterteacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under theperson of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave ofMammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, andyet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in thisworld so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanningof error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and withless danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by readingall manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this isthe benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read. 

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

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

But on the other side that infection which is from books of controversyin religion is more doubtful and dangerous to the learned than tothe ignorant; and yet those books must be permitted untouched by thelicenser. It will be hard to instance where any ignorant man hath beenever seduced by papistical book in English, unless it were commended andexpounded 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 doctorshow many have been corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits andSorbonists, and how fast they could transfuse that corruption into thepeople, our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot, since theacute and distinct Arminius was perverted merely by the perusing of anameless discourse written at Delft, which at first he took in hand toconfute. 

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

Besides another inconvenience, if learned men be the first receivers outof books and dispreaders both of vice and error, how shall the licensersthemselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or theyassume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace ofinfallibility and uncorruptedness? And again, if it be true that a wiseman, 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 advantageto his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which beingrestrained will be no hindrance to his folly. For if there should be somuch exactness always used to keep that from him which is unfit for hisreading, we should in the judgment of Aristotle not only, but of Solomonand of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him good precepts, and by consequencenot willingly admit him to good books; as being certain that a wise manwill make better use of an idle pamphlet, than a fool will do of sacredScripture. 

'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations withoutnecessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vain things. To boththese objections one answer will serve, out of the grounds already laid, that to all men such books are not temptations, nor vanities, but usefuldrugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strongmedicines, which man's life cannot want. The rest, as children andchildish men, who have not the art to qualify and prepare these workingminerals, well may be exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly theycannot be by all the licensing that Sainted Inquisition could ever yetcontrive. Which is what I promised to deliver next: that this order oflicensing conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed; and hathalmost prevented me by being clear already while thus much hath beenexplaining. See the ingenuity of Truth, who, when she gets a free andwilling hand, opens herself faster than the pace of method and discoursecan overtake her. 

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

Plato, a man of high authority, indeed, but least of all for hisCommonwealth, in the book of his Laws, which no city ever yet received, fed his fancy by making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which theywho otherwise admire him wish had been rather buried and excused inthe genial cups of an Academic night sitting. By which laws he seems totolerate no kind of learning but by unalterable decree, consisting mostof practical traditions, to the attainment whereof a library of smallerbulk 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 hadwritten, until the judges and law-keepers had seen it, and allowed it. But that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth whichhe had imagined, and to no other, is evident. Why was he not else alawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by his ownmagistrates; both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books ofgrossest infamy, and also for commending the latter of them, thoughhe were the malicious libeller of his chief friends, to be read by thetyrant Dionysius, who had little need of such trash to spend histime on? But that he knew this licensing of poems had referenceand dependence to many other provisos there set down in his fanciedrepublic, which in this world could have no place: and so neither hehimself, nor any magistrate or city, ever imitated that course, which, taken apart from those other collateral injunctions, must needs be vainand fruitless. For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unlesstheir care were equal to regulate all other things of like aptness tocorrupt the mind, that single endeavour they knew would be but afond labour; to shut and fortify one gate against corruption, and benecessitated to leave others round about wide open. 

If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we mustregulate 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 andDoric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, ordeportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall bethought honest; for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more thanthe work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, andthe guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as theydo, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence allthe airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windowsalso, and the balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, withdangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them, shalltwenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquirewhat lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to the ballatryand the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman'sArcadias, and his Monte Mayors. 

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

To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, whichnever can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordainwisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placedus unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of books will do this, whichnecessarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, aswill make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; butthose unwritten, or at least unconstraining, laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions as the bonds andligaments of the commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of everywritten statute; these they be which will bear chief sway in suchmatters as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity andremissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here thegreat art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint andpunishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. 

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

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

This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command ustemperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to aprofuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wanderbeyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigourcontrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scantingthose means, which books freely permitted are, both to the trial ofvirtue and the exercise of truth? It would be better done, to learnthat the law must needs be frivolous, which goes to restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to evil. And were I thechooser, a dream of well-doing should be preferred before many timesas much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems thegrowth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint often vicious. 

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

Yet though ye should condescend to this, which God forbid, the Orderstill would be but fruitless and defective to that end whereto ye meantit. If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so unread or so uncatechizedin story, that hath not heard of many sects refusing books as ahindrance, and preserving their doctrine unmixed for many ages, only byunwritten traditions? The Christian faith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown to have spread all over Asia, ere any Gospel or Epistlewas seen in writing. If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look intoItaly and Spain, whether those places be one scruple the better, thehonester, the wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigourthat hath been executed upon books. 

Another reason, whereby to make it plain that this Order will missthe end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be in everylicenser. It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit uponthe birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted into this worldor not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in thecensure of what is passable or not; which is also no mean injury. Ifhe be of such worth as behooves him, there cannot be a more tedious andunpleasing 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 atcertain 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 anytime in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believehow he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensiblenostril, should be able to endure. In this one thing I crave leave ofthe present licensers to be pardoned for so thinking; who doubtless tookthis office up, looking on it through their obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all things seem easy and unlaborious tothem; but that this short trial hath wearied them out already, theirown expressions and excuses to them who make so many journeys to solicittheir licence are testimony enough. Seeing therefore those who nowpossess the employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid ofit; and that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of hisown hours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put himselfto the salary of a press corrector; we may easily foresee what kind oflicensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, andremiss, or basely pecuniary. This is what I had to show, wherein thisOrder cannot conduce to that end whereof it bears the intention. 

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

It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every leastbreath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more equallyChurch revenues, that then all learning would be for ever dashed anddiscouraged. But as for that opinion, I never found cause to think thatthe tenth part of learning stood or fell with the clergy: nor could Iever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy speech of any churchmanwho had a competency left him. If therefore ye be loath to disheartenutterly and discontent, not the mercenary crew of false pretenders tolearning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were bornto study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre or any other endbut the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame andperpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be thereward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind;then know that, so far to distrust the judgment and the honesty of onewho hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended, as notto count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and examiner, lesthe should drop a schism, or something of corruption, is the greatestdispleasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be putupon him. 

What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue of anImprimatur; if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no morethan the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue, must not be utteredwithout the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser? Hewho is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known tobe evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no greatargument to think himself reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he wasborn for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to theworld, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; hesearches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and conferswith his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to beinformed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him. If, inthis the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, noindustry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that stateof maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless hecarry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings andexpense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps his inferior in judgment, perhaps onewho never knew the labour of bookwriting, and if he be not repulsed orslighted, must appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and hiscensor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety that heis no idiot or seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation tothe author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning. 

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

And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching;how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had betterbe silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under thetuition, under the correction of his patriarchal licenser to blot oralter what precisely accords not with the hidebound humour which hecalls his judgment? When every acute reader, upon the first sight of apedantic licence, will be ready with these like words to ding the booka quoit's distance from him: I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not aninstructor that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist. Iknow nothing of the licenser, but that I have his own hand here for hisarrogance; who shall warrant me his judgment? The State, sir, repliesthe 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 issome common stuff; and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon, THATSUCH AUTHORIZED BOOKS ARE BUT THE LANGUAGE OF THE TIMES. For though alicenser should happen to be judicious more than ordinary, which willbe a great jeopardy of the next succession, yet his very office and hiscommission enjoins him to let pass nothing but what is vulgarly receivedalready. 

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 totheir hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted, if there be foundin his book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the heightof zeal (and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divinespirit?) 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 shallto all posterity be lost, for the fearfulness or the presumptuousrashness of a perfunctory licenser. And to what an author this violencehath been lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to befaithfully published, I could now instance, but shall forbear till amore convenient season. 

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

And it is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive, and mostinjurious to the written labours and monuments of the dead, so to me itseems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation. I cannot setso light by all the invention, the art, the wit, the grave and solidjudgment which is in England, as that it can be comprehended in anytwenty capacities how good soever, much less that it should not passexcept their superintendence be over it, except it be sifted andstrained with their strainers, that it should be uncurrent withouttheir manual stamp. Truth and understanding are not such wares as to bemonopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We mustnot 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 itbut a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowedthe sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair fromall quarters to twenty licensing forges? Had anyone written and divulgederroneous things and scandalous to honest life, misusing and forfeitingthe esteem had of his reason among men, if after conviction this onlycensure were adjudged him that he should never henceforth write butwhat were first examined by an appointed officer, whose hand should beannexed to pass his credit for him that now he might be safely read; itcould not be apprehended less than a disgraceful punishment. Whence toinclude the whole nation, and those that never yet thus offended, undersuch a diffident and suspectful prohibition, may plainly be understoodwhat a disparagement it is. So much the more, whenas debtors anddelinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unoffensive books mustnot stir forth without a visible jailer in their title. 

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

And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our ministers also, ofwhose labours we should hope better, and of the proficiency which theirflock reaps by them, than that after all this light of the Gospel whichis, and is to be, and all this continual preaching, they should still befrequented with such an unprincipled, unedified and laic rabble, asthat the whiff of every new pamphlet should stagger them out of theircatechism and Christian walking. This may have much reason to discouragethe ministers when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations, and the benefiting of their hearers, as that they are not thought fitto be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser; that allthe 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 thecastle of St. Angelo of an Imprimatur. 

And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that thesearguments of learned men's discouragement at this your Order are mereflourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen and heard inother countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I havesat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been countedhappy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as theysupposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan theservile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; thatthis was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing hadbeen there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, aprisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise thanthe Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knewthat England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that othernations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope thatthose worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leadersto such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution oftime that this world hath to finish. When that was once begun, it was aslittle in my fear that what words of complaint I heard among learned menof other parts uttered against the Inquisition, the same I should hearby as learned men at home, uttered in time of Parliament against anorder of licensing; and that so generally that, when I had disclosedmyself a companion of their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an honest quaestorship had endeared to the Sicilians wasnot more by them importuned against Verres, than the favourable opinionwhich 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 tolay together that which just reason should bring into my mind, towardthe removal of an undeserved thraldom upon learning. That this isnot therefore the disburdening of a particular fancy, but the commongrievance of all those who had prepared their minds and studiesabove the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, and from others toentertain it, thus much may satisfy. 

And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal whatthe general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again andlicensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so suspiciousof all men, as to fear each book and the shaking of every leaf, beforewe know what the contents are; if some who but of late were littlebetter than silenced from preaching shall come now to silence us fromreading, except what they please, it cannot be guessed what is intendedby some but a second tyranny over learning: and will soon put it out ofcontroversy, that bishops and presbyters are the same to us, both nameand thing. That those evils of prelaty, which before from five or sixand twenty sees were distributively charged upon the whole people, willnow light wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us: whenas now thepastor of a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be exaltedarchbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but keephis other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late cried downthe sole ordination of every novice Bachelor of Art, and denied solejurisdiction over the simplest parishioner, shall now at home in hisprivate chair assume both these over worthiest and excellentest booksand ablest authors that write them. 

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

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

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrivesby exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared inScripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetualprogression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things onlybecause his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, withoutknowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth heholds becomes his heresy. 

There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to anotherthan the charge and care of their religion. There be--who knows not thatthere be?--of Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrantan implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man, addictedto his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic soentangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries hecannot 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 withhis neighbours in that. What does he therefore, but resolves to giveover toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care andcredit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; somedivine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resignsthe whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, intohis custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion;esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatoryof his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no morewithin himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and comesnear him, according as that good man frequents the house. He entertainshim, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home atnight, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced brewage, andbetter breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fedon green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroadat eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all daywithout his religion. 

Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shall beordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but whatpasses through the custom-house of certain publicans that have thetonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will straight givethemselves up into your hands, make 'em and cut 'em out what religion yeplease: there be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes thatwill fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious yearas in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with thatwhich others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their ownpurveying? These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of ourknowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly and how to bewished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformitywould it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece offramework, as any January could freeze together. 

Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergythemselves. It is no new thing never heard of before, for a parochialminister, who has his reward and is at his Hercules' pillars in a warmbenefice, to be easily inclinable, if he have nothing else that mayrouse up his studies, to finish his circuit in an English Concordanceand a topic folio, the gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony and a Catena; treading the constant round of certain commondoctrinal heads, attended with their uses, motives, marks, andmeans, out of which, as out of an alphabet, or sol-fa, by forming andtransforming, joining and disjoining variously, a little bookcraft, andtwo hours' meditation, might furnish him unspeakably to the performanceof more than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to reckon up the infinitehelps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear. But as for the multitude of sermons ready printed and piled up, on everytext 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 hallowedlimits more vendible ware of all sorts ready made: so that penury henever need fear of pulpit provision, having where so plenteously torefresh his magazine. But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if hisback door be not secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold bookmay now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his oldcollections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about hisreceived opinions, to walk the round and counter-round with his fellowinspectors, fearing lest any of his flock be seduced, who also thenwould be better instructed, better exercised and disciplined. And Godsend that the fear of this diligence, which must then be used, do notmake us affect the laziness of a licensing Church. 

For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truthguiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weakand frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligiousgadding 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 taughtus what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is moredangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world what his opinionis, what his reasons, and wherefore that which is now thought cannot besound? Christ urged it as wherewith to justify himself, that he preachedin public; yet writing is more public than preaching; and more easyto refutation, if need be, there being so many whose business andprofession merely it is to be the champions of truth; which if theyneglect, what can be imputed but their sloth, or unability?

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

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

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and wasa perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and hisApostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked raceof deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with hisconspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virginTruth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered themto the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made forthe 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 andCommons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shallbring together every joint and member, and shall mould them intoan immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not theselicensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity, forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue todo our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint. 

We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, itsmites us into darkness. Who can discern those planets that are oftcombust, and those stars of brightest magnitude that rise and set withthe sun, until the opposite motion of their orbs bring them to such aplace in the firmament, where they may be seen evening or morning? Thelight which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, butby it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. Itis not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop, and theremoving him from off the presbyterian shoulders, that will make us ahappy nation. No, if other things as great in the Church, and in therule of life both economical and political, be not looked into andreformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius andCalvin hath beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be whoperpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamitythat any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own pride andignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear withmeekness, nor can convince; yet all must be suppressed which is notfound in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividersof unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those disseveredpieces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth. To be still searchingwhat we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as wefind it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional), this is thegolden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up thebest harmony in a Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, andneutral, and inwardly divided minds. 

Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of aquick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewyto discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that humancapacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepestsciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers ofgood antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even theschool of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from theold philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, JuliusAgricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural witsof Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it fornothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly fromas far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynianwilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to learn our languageand our theologic arts. 

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious andpropending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forththe first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had itnot been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divineand admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic andinnovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the nameof Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming allour neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergyhave with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto thelatest and the backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have madeus the teachers. Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and bythe general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnlyexpress their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and greatperiod in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: whatdoes 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 wemark not the method of his counsels, and are unworthy. 

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

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be mucharguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is butknowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect andschism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge andunderstanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lamentof, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this piousforwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of theirreligion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, alittle forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might winall these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherlysearch after truth; could we but forgo this prelatical tradition ofcrowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons andprecepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger shouldcome among us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and howto govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrityof our extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth andfreedom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the Romandocility and courage: If such were my Epirots, I would not despair thegreatest design that could be attempted, to make a Church or kingdomhappy. 

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

Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritualarchitecture, when great reformation is expected. For now the time seemscome, wherein Moses the great prophet may sit in heaven rejoicing tosee that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not onlyour seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets. Nomarvel then though some men, and some good men too perhaps, but young ingoodness, as Joshua then was, envy them. They fret, and out of their ownweakness are in agony, lest these divisions and subdivisions will undous. The adversary again applauds, and waits the hour: when they havebranched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties andpartitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm root, outof which we all grow, though into branches: nor will beware until hesee our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of hisill-united and unwieldy brigade. And that we are to hope better ofall these supposed sects and schisms, and that we shall not need thatsolicitude, honest perhaps, though over-timorous, of them that vex inthis behalf, but shall laugh in the end at those malicious applauders ofour differences, I have these reasons to persuade me. 

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, hernavigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance andbattle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her walls and suburbtrenches, that then the people, or the greater part, more than at othertimes, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most importantmatters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things notbefore discoursed or written of, argues first a singular goodwill, contentedness and confidence in your prudent foresight and safegovernment, Lords and Commons; and from thence derives itself to agallant bravery and well-grounded contempt of their enemies, as if therewere no small number of as great spirits among us, as his was, who whenRome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that pieceof ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his ownregiment. 

Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success andvictory. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure andvigorous, not only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in theacutest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues inwhat good plight and constitution the body is; so when the cheerfulnessof the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith toguard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow uponthe solidest and sublimest points of controversy and new invention, itbetokens us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but castingoff the old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs andwax young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperousvirtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herselflike a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks:methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindlingher undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling herlong-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while thewhole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that lovethe twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in theirenvious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms. 

What would ye do then? should ye suppress all this flowery crop ofknowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city?Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over it, to bring afamine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what ismeasured to us by their bushel? Believe it, Lords and Commons, theywho counsel ye to such a suppressing do as good as bid ye suppressyourselves; and I will soon show how. If it be desired to know theimmediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there cannotbe assigned a truer than your own mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happycounsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all greatwits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits likethe influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlargedand lifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves. 

Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuingof the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, lessthe lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorantagain, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but you thenmust first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary andtyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our heartsare now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search andexpectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your ownvirtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that, unless ye reinforce anabrogated and merciless law, that fathers may dispatch at will their ownchildren. 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 ofDanegelt. Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yetlove my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, toutter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. 

What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful and sounequal to suppress opinions for the newness or the unsuitableness toa customary acceptance, will not be my task to say. I only shall repeatwhat I have learned from one of your own honourable number, a rightnoble and pious lord, who, had he not sacrificed his life and fortunesto the Church and Commonwealth, we had not now missed and bewailed aworthy 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 ofsects and schisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of hisdying charge, which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard withye, so full of meekness and breathing charity, that next to his lasttestament, who bequeathed love and peace to his disciples, I cannotcall to mind where I have read or heard words more mild and peaceful. Hethere exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those, howeverthey be miscalled, that desire to live purely, in such a use of God'sordinances, as the best guidance of their conscience gives them, andto tolerate them, though in some disconformity to ourselves. The bookitself will tell us more at large, being published to the world, anddedicated to the Parliament by him who, both for his life and for hisdeath, deserves that what advice he left be not laid by without perusal. 

And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speak what mayhelp to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The temple ofJanus with his two controversial faces might now not unsignificantly beset open. And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose toplay upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her andFalsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free andopen encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing. He whohears what praying there is for light and clearer knowledge to be sentdown among us, would think of other matters to be constituted beyondthe discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. Yetwhen the new light which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envyand oppose, if it come not first in at their casements. What a collusionis this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, toseek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early and late, that anotherorder shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute? When a man hathbeen labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage: drawn forthhis reasons as it were a battle ranged: scattered and defeated allobjections in his way; calls out his adversary into the plain, offershim the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may trythe matter by dint of argument: for his opponents then to skulk, to layambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challengershould pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weaknessand cowardice in the wars of Truth. 

For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needsno 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 shespeaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when hewas caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, asMicaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yetis it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. What elseis all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on thisside or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but a vainshadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that hand-writingnailed to the cross? What great purchase is this Christian liberty whichPaul 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 manyother things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had webut charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to beever judging one another?

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

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

In the meanwhile if any one would write, and bring his helpful hand tothe slow-moving Reformation which we labour under, if Truth have spokento him before others, or but seemed at least to speak, who hath sobejesuited us that we should trouble that man with asking license to doso 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; whosefirst appearance to our eyes, bleared and dimmed with prejudice andcustom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors, even as theperson is of many a great man slight and contemptuous to see to. Andwhat do they tell us vainly of new opinions, when this very opinion oftheirs, that none must be heard but whom they like, is the worst andnewest opinion of all others; and is the chief cause why sects andschisms do so much abound, and true knowledge is kept at distance fromus; besides yet a greater danger which is in it. 

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

Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place thesehis 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 setplaces, and assemblies, and outward callings of men; planting our faithone while in the old Convocation house, and another while in the Chapelat Westminster; when all the faith and religion that shall be therecanonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charityof patient instruction to supple the least bruise of conscience, toedify the meanest Christian, who desires to walk in the Spirit, and notin the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can bethere made; no, though Harry VII himself there, with all his liege tombsabout him, should lend them voices from the dead, to swell their number. 

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

There have been not a few since the beginning of this Parliament, bothof the presbytery and others, who by their unlicensed books, to thecontempt of an Imprimatur, first broke that triple ice clung about ourhearts, and taught the people to see day: I hope that none of those werethe persuaders to renew upon us this bondage which they themselves havewrought so much good by contemning. But if neither the check that Mosesgave to young Joshua, nor the countermand which our Saviour gaveto young John, who was so ready to prohibit those whom he thoughtunlicensed, be not enough to admonish our elders how unacceptable toGod their testy mood of prohibiting is; if neither their own remembrancewhat evil hath abounded in the Church by this set of licensing, and whatgood they themselves have begun by transgressing it, be not enough, but that they will persuade and execute the most Dominican part of theInquisition over us, and are already with one foot in the stirrup soactive at suppressing, it would be no unequal distribution in the firstplace to suppress the suppressors themselves: whom the change of theircondition hath puffed up, more than their late experience of hardertimes hath made wise. 

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honourof advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order publishednext before this, "that no book be printed, unless the printer's and theauthor's name, or at least the printer's, be registered. " Those whichotherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, thefire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectualremedy that man's prevention can use. For this authentic Spanish policyof licensing books, if I have said aught, will prove the most unlicensedbook itself within a short while; and was the immediate image of a StarChamber decree to that purpose made in those very times when that Courtdid the rest of those her pious works, for which she is now fallenfrom the stars with Lucifer. Whereby ye may guess what kind of stateprudence, what love of the people, what care of religion or goodmanners there was at the contriving, although with singular hypocrisyit pretended to bind books to their good behaviour. And how it got theupper hand of your precedent Order so well constituted before, if we maybelieve those men whose profession gives them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees andmonopolizers in the trade of bookselling; who under pretence of the poorin their Company not to be defrauded, and the just retaining of each manhis several copy, which God forbid should be gainsaid, brought diversglossing colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, andserving to no end except it be to exercise a superiority over theirneighbours; men who do not therefore labour in an honest professionto which learning is indebted, that they should be made other men'svassals. Another end is thought was aimed at by some of them inprocuring by petition this Order, that, having power in their hands, malignant books might the easier scape abroad, as the event shows. 

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