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Title: Areopagitica

Author: John Milton

Release date: January 21, 2006 [eBook #608]
Most recently updated: February 23, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/608

Credits: Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger

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AREOPAGITICA

By John Milton

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

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

Euripid. Hicetid.

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

promote their country's liberty; whereof this whole discourse proposed will
be a certain testimony, if not a trophy. For this is not the liberty which we
can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth—that
let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard,
deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil
liberty attained that wise men look for. To which if I now manifest by the
very sound of this which I shall utter, that we are already in good part
arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition
grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman
recovery, it will be attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of
God our deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom,
Lords and Commons of England. Neither is it in God's esteem the
diminution of his glory, when honourable things are spoken of good men
and worthy magistrates; which if I now first should begin to do, after so fair
a progress of your laudable deeds, and such a long obligement upon the
whole realm to your indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckoned among
the tardiest, and the unwillingest of them that praise ye.
Nevertheless there being three principal things, without which all
praising is but courtship and flattery: First, when that only is praised which
is solidly worth praise: next, when greatest likelihoods are brought that such
things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed: the
other, when he who praises, by showing that such his actual persuasion is of
whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two of
these I have heretofore endeavoured, rescuing the employment from him
who went about to impair your merits with a trivial and malignant
encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine own acquittal, that whom
I so extolled I did not flatter, hath been reserved opportunely to this
occasion.
For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to
declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of
his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on your
proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainest advice is a
kind of praising. For though I should affirm and hold by argument, that it
would fare better with truth, with learning and the Commonwealth, if one of
your published Orders, which I should name, were called in; yet at the same
time it could not but much redound to the lustre of your mild and equal
government, whenas private persons are hereby animated to think ye better

pleased with public advice, than other statists have been delighted
heretofore with public flattery. And men will then see what difference there
is between the magnanimity of a triennial Parliament, and that jealous
haughtiness of prelates and cabin counsellors that usurped of late, whenas
they shall observe ye in the midst of your victories and successes more
gently brooking written exceptions against a voted Order than other courts,
which had produced nothing worth memory but the weak ostentation of
wealth, would have endured the least signified dislike at any sudden
proclamation.
If I should thus far presume upon the meek demeanour of your civil and
gentle greatness, Lords and Commons, as what your published Order hath
directly said, that to gainsay, I might defend myself with ease, if any should
accuse me of being new or insolent, did they but know how much better I
find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece, than the
barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. And out of those
ages, to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not yet Goths
and Jutlanders, I could name him who from his private house wrote that
discourse to the Parliament of Athens, that persuades them to change the
form of democracy which was then established. Such honour was done in
those days to men who professed the study of wisdom and eloquence, not
only in their own country, but in other lands, that cities and signiories heard
them gladly, and with great respect, if they had aught in public to admonish
the state. Thus did Dion Prusaeus, a stranger and a private orator, counsel
the Rhodians against a former edict; and I abound with other like examples,
which to set here would be superfluous.
But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours,
and those natural endowments haply not the worst for two and fifty degrees
of northern latitude, so much must be derogated, as to count me not equal to
any of those who had this privilege, I would obtain to be thought not so
inferior, as yourselves are superior to the most of them who received their
counsel: and how far you excel them, be assured, Lords and Commons,
there can no greater testimony appear, than when your prudent spirit
acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be
heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any Act of your own
setting forth, as any set forth by your predecessors.

If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye were not, I know not
what should withhold me from presenting ye with a fit instance wherein to
show both that love of truth which ye eminently profess, and that
uprightness of your judgment which is not wont to be partial to yourselves;
by judging over again that Order which ye have ordained to regulate
printing:—that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed,
unless the same be first approved and licensed by such, or at least one of
such, as shall be thereto appointed. For that part which preserves justly
every man's copy to himself, or provides for the poor, I touch not, only wish
they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute honest and painful men,
who offend not in either of these particulars. But that other clause of
licensing books, which we thought had died with his brother quadragesimal
and matrimonial when the prelates expired, I shall now attend with such a
homily, as shall lay before ye, first the inventors of it to be those whom ye
will be loath to own; next what is to be thought in general of reading,
whatever sort the books be; and that this Order avails nothing to the
suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, which were
mainly intended to be suppressed. Last, that it will be primely to the
discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by
disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by
hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in
religious and civil wisdom.
I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and
Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as
well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on
them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do
contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose
progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and
extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively,
and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being
sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the
other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a
good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he
who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it
were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is
the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on
purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof

perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the
loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.
We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living
labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved
and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus
committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole
impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the
slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the
breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. But lest I
should be condemned of introducing license, while I oppose licensing, I
refuse not the pains to be so much historical, as will serve to show what
hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealths against this
disorder, till the very time that this project of licensing crept out of the
Inquisition, was catched up by our prelates, and hath caught some of our
presbyters.
In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part
of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the magistrate cared
to take notice of; those either blasphemous and atheistical, or libellous.
Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopagus commanded
to be burnt, and himself banished the territory for a discourse begun with
his confessing not to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS, OR
WHETHER NOT. And against defaming, it was decreed that none should
be traduced by name, as was the manner of Vetus Comoedia, whereby we
may guess how they censured libelling. And this course was quick enough,
as Cicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists, and the
open way of defaming, as the event showed. Of other sects and opinions,
though tending to voluptuousness, and the denying of divine Providence,
they took no heed.
Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine school of
Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questioned by the
laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those old comedians were
suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and that Plato
commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of them all, to his royal
scholar Dionysius, is commonly known, and may be excused, if holy
Chrysostom, as is reported, nightly studied so much the same author and

had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing
sermon.
That other leading city of Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that
Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been
the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the
poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his
smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is
to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought
but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for
they disliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, and took a slight
occasion to chase Archilochus out of their city, perhaps for composing in a
higher strain than their own soldierly ballads and roundels could reach to.
Or if it were for his broad verses, they were not therein so cautious but they
were as dissolute in their promiscuous conversing; whence Euripides
affirms in Andromache, that their women were all unchaste. Thus much
may give us light after what sort of books were prohibited among the
Greeks.
The Romans also, for many ages trained up only to a military roughness
resembling most the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learning little but what
their twelve Tables, and the Pontific College with their augurs and flamens
taught them in religion and law; so unacquainted with other learning, that
when Carneades and Critolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes, coming
ambassadors to Rome, took thereby occasion to give the city a taste of their
philosophy, they were suspected for seducers by no less a man than Cato
the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss them speedily, and to
banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipio and others of the
noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine austerity; honoured and
admired the men; and the censor himself at last, in his old age, fell to the
study of that whereof before he was so scrupulous. And yet at the same time
Naevius and Plautus, the first Latin comedians, had filled the city with all
the borrowed scenes of Menander and Philemon. Then began to be
considered there also what was to be done to libellous books and authors;
for Naevius was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, and released
by the tribunes upon his recantation; we read also that libels were burnt, and
the makers punished by Augustus. The like severity, no doubt, was used, if
aught were impiously written against their esteemed gods. Except in these
two points, how the world went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning.

And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies his Epicurism to
Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero, so
great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself disputes against that
opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical sharpness or naked
plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by any order prohibited. And
for matters of state, the story of Titus Livius, though it extolled that part
which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by Octavius Caesar of
the other faction. But that Naso was by him banished in his old age, for the
wanton poems of his youth, was but a mere covert of state over some secret
cause: and besides, the books were neither banished nor called in. From
hence we shall meet with little else but tyranny in the Roman empire, that
we may not marvel, if not so often bad as good books were silenced. I shall
therefore deem to have been large enough, in producing what among the
ancients was punishable to write; save only which, all other arguments were
free to treat on.
By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose discipline in
this point I do not find to have been more severe than what was formerly in
practice. The books of those whom they took to be grand heretics were
examined, refuted, and condemned in the general Councils; and not till then
were prohibited, or burnt, by authority of the emperor. As for the writings of
heathen authors, unless they were plain invectives against Christianity, as
those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with no interdict that can be
cited, till about the year 400, in a Carthaginian Council, wherein bishops
themselves were forbid to read the books of Gentiles, but heresies they
might read: while others long before them, on the contrary, scrupled more
the books of heretics than of Gentiles. And that the primitive Councils and
bishops were wont only to declare what books were not commendable,
passing no further, but leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to lay
by, till after the year 800, is observed already by Padre Paolo, the great
unmasker of the Trentine Council.
After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of
political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's
eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to be
read what they fancied not; yet sparing in their censures, and the books not
many which they so dealt with: till Martin V., by his bull, not only
prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of heretical
books; for about that time Wickliffe and Huss, growing terrible, were they

who first drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of prohibiting. Which
course Leo X. and his successors followed, until the Council of Trent and
the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth, or perfected,
those Catalogues and expurging Indexes, that rake through the entrails of
many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered
to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was
not to their palate, they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight
into the new purgatory of an index.
To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain
that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter had
bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of Paradise) unless it were
approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton friars. For
example:

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

VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence.

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

NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence.

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

VINCENT RABBATTA, etc.

It may be printed, July 15.

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

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

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

Holy Palace.

BELCASTRO, Vicegerent.

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

Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the
piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with
their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at
the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge. These are the
pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that so bewitched of late
our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made; and
besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth
House, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly Romanizing, that the
word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learned grammatical
pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; or perhaps, as they
thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit
of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of
men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not
easily find servile letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption
English.
And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped
up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard
of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any statute left us by
our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed
city or church abroad, but from the most anti-christian council and the most
tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as freely
admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no
more stifled than the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged
over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a
monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But
that a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand
before a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the
judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry
backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity,
provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new
limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books also within the
number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously

snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops,
and the attendant minorites their chaplains. That ye like not now these most
certain authors of this licensing order, and that all sinister intention was far
distant from your thoughts, when ye were importuned the passing it, all
men who know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honour truth, will
clear ye readily.
But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing for all
that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no such deep invention, but
obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest
commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborne to use it, and
falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to
no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of
Reformation; I am of those who believe it will be a harder alchemy than
Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet
this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a
dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, for the tree that bore
it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it has. But I have first to
finish, as was propounded, what is to be thought in general of reading
books, whatever sort they be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm
that thence proceeds.
Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were
skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, which
could not probably be without reading their books of all sorts; in Paul
especially, who thought it no defilement to insert into Holy Scripture the
sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them a tragedian; the question
was notwithstanding sometimes controverted among the primitive doctors,
but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and
profitable; as was then evidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate and
subtlest enemy to our faith made a decree forbidding Christians the study of
heathen learning: for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and
with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the Christians
were put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and so much in danger to
decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a man may
say, to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into
divers forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new
Christian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the providence of God
provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his son, by taking

away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So great an
injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a
persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the Church, than the
open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian.
And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil whipped St.
Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or else it was a phantasm bred
by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his
discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms, and
had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to
correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus, whom he
confesses to have been reading, not long before; next to correct him only,
and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid
studies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil
teaches how some good use may be made of Margites, a sportful poem, not
now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of Morgante, an Italian
romance much to the same purpose?
But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a vision recorded
by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerome, to the nun Eustochium,
and, besides, has nothing of a fever in it. Dionysius Alexandrinus was about
the year 240 a person of great name in the Church for piety and learning,
who had wont to avail himself much against heretics by being conversant in
their books; until a certain presbyter laid it scrupulously to his conscience,
how he durst venture himself among those defiling volumes. The worthy
man, loath to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself what was to
be thought; when suddenly a vision sent from God (it is his own epistle that
so avers it) confirmed him in these words: READ ANY BOOKS
WHATEVER COME TO THY HANDS, FOR THOU ART SUFFICIENT
BOTH TO JUDGE ARIGHT AND TO EXAMINE EACH MATTER. To
this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was
answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians, PROVE ALL
THINGS, HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. And he might have
added another remarkable saying of the same author: TO THE PURE, ALL
THINGS ARE PURE; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge
whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the
books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil
substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said without exception,
RISE, PETER, KILL AND EAT, leaving the choice to each man's
discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing
from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable
to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the
healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to
a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to
confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what better witness can ye
expect I should produce, than one of your own now sitting in Parliament,
the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden; whose volume of
natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought
together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically
demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are
of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is
truest. I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of
man's body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left
arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature
man might have to exercise his own leading capacity.
How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the
whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust, without
particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown
man. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews from heaven, that
omer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to have
been more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as many
meals. For those actions which enter into a man, rather than issue out of
him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual
childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his
own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and
compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were
governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us, that much reading is a
weariness to the flesh; but neither he nor other inspired author tells us that
such or such reading is unlawful: yet certainly had God thought good to
limit us herein, it had been much more expedient to have told us what was
unlawful than what was wearisome. As for the burning of those Ephesian
books by St. Paul's converts; 'tis replied the books were magic, the Syriac
so renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a

voluntary imitation: the men in remorse burnt those books which were their
own; the magistrate by this example is not appointed; these men practised
the books, another might perhaps have read them in some sort usefully.
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with
the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be
discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as
an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and
evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And
perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil,
that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is;
what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the
knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her
baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet
prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of
the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity
much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.
That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil,
and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it,
is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental
whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser,
whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,
describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with
his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss,
that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge
and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human
virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we
more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity
than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason?
And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.
But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usually reckoned.
First, is feared the infection that may spread; but then all human learning

and controversy in religious points must remove out of the world, yea the
Bible itself; for that ofttimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the
carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men
passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of
Epicurus: in other great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the
common reader. And ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginal
Keri, that Moses and all the prophets cannot persuade him to pronounce the
textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know the Bible itself put by the
Papist put by the Papist into the first rank of prohibited books. The
ancientest Fathers must be next removed, as Clement of Alexandria, and
that Eusebian book of Evangelic preparation, transmitting our ears through
a hoard of heathenish obscenities to receive the Gospel. Who finds not that
Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others discover more heresies than they
well confute, and that oft for heresy which is the truer opinion?
Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers of greatest
infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up the life of human
learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, so long as we are sure those
languages are known as well to the worst of men, who are both most able
and most diligent to instil the poison they suck, first into the courts of
princes, acquainting them with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin.
As perhaps did that Petronius whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of
his revels; and the notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded and yet dear to the
Italian courtiers. I name not him for posterity's sake, whom Henry VIII.
named in merriment his vicar of hell. By which compendious way all the
contagion that foreign books can infuse will find a passage to the people far
easier and shorter than an Indian voyage, though it could be sailed either by
the north of Cataio eastward, or of Canada westward, while our Spanish
licensing gags the English press never so severely.
But on the other side that infection which is from books of controversy in
religion is more doubtful and dangerous to the learned than to the ignorant;
and yet those books must be permitted untouched by the licenser. It will be
hard to instance where any ignorant man hath been ever seduced by
papistical book in English, unless it were commended and expounded to
him by some of that clergy: and indeed all such tractates, whether false or
true, are as the prophecy of Isaiah was to the eunuch, not to be
UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT A GUIDE. But of our priests and doctors how
many have been corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits and

Sorbonists, and how fast they could transfuse that corruption into the
people, our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot, since the acute
and distinct Arminius was perverted merely by the perusing of a nameless
discourse written at Delft, which at first he took in hand to confute.
Seeing, therefore, that those books, and those in great abundance, which
are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine, cannot be suppressed without the
fall of learning and of all ability in disputation, and that these books of
either sort are most and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the
common people whatever is heretical or dissolute may quickly be
conveyed, and that evil manners are as perfectly learnt without books a
thousand other ways which cannot be stopped, and evil doctrine not with
books can propagate, except a teacher guide, which he might also do
without writing, and so beyond prohibiting, I am not able to unfold, how
this cautelous enterprise of licensing can be exempted from the number of
vain and impossible attempts. And he who were pleasantly disposed could
not well avoid to liken it to the exploit of that gallant man who thought to
pound up the crows by shutting his park gate.
Besides another inconvenience, if learned men be the first receivers out
of books and dispreaders both of vice and error, how shall the licensers
themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume
to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and
uncorruptedness? And again, if it be true that a wise man, like a good
refiner, can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a
fool with the best book, yea or without book; there is no reason that we
should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we seek
to restrain from a fool, that which being restrained will be no hindrance to
his folly. For if there should be so much exactness always used to keep that
from him which is unfit for his reading, we should in the judgment of
Aristotle not only, but of Solomon and of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him
good precepts, and by consequence not willingly admit him to good books;
as being certain that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet,
than a fool will do of sacred Scripture.
'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations without
necessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vain things. To both these
objections one answer will serve, out of the grounds already laid, that to all
men such books are not temptations, nor vanities, but useful drugs and

materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong medicines,
which man's life cannot want. The rest, as children and childish men, who
have not the art to qualify and prepare these working minerals, well may be
exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly they cannot be by all the licensing
that Sainted Inquisition could ever yet contrive. Which is what I promised
to deliver next: that this order of licensing conduces nothing to the end for
which it was framed; and hath almost prevented me by being clear already
while thus much hath been explaining. See the ingenuity of Truth, who,
when she gets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace of
method and discourse can overtake her.
It was the task which I began with, to show that no nation, or well-
instituted state, if they valued books at all, did ever use this way of
licensing; and it might be answered, that this is a piece of prudence lately
discovered. To which I return, that as it was a thing slight and obvious to
think on, so if it had been difficult to find out, there wanted not among them
long since who suggested such a course; which they not following, leave us
a pattern of their judgment that it was not the rest knowing, but the not
approving, which was the cause of their not using it.
Plato, a man of high authority, indeed, but least of all for his
Commonwealth, in the book of his Laws, which no city ever yet received,
fed his fancy by making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they
who otherwise admire him wish had been rather buried and excused in the
genial cups of an Academic night sitting. By which laws he seems to
tolerate no kind of learning but by unalterable decree, consisting most of
practical traditions, to the attainment whereof a library of smaller bulk than
his own Dialogues would be abundant. And there also enacts, that no poet
should so much as read to any private man what he had written, until the
judges and law-keepers had seen it, and allowed it. But that Plato meant this
law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined, and to no
other, is evident. Why was he not else a lawgiver to himself, but a
transgressor, and to be expelled by his own magistrates; both for the wanton
epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual reading of
Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy, and also for
commending the latter of them, though he were the malicious libeller of his
chief friends, to be read by the tyrant Dionysius, who had little need of such
trash to spend his time on? But that he knew this licensing of poems had
reference and dependence to many other provisos there set down in his

fancied republic, which in this world could have no place: and so neither he
himself, nor any magistrate or city, ever imitated that course, which, taken
apart from those other collateral injunctions, must needs be vain and
fruitless. For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were
equal to regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind, that
single endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour; to shut and fortify
one gate against corruption, and be necessitated to leave others round about
wide open.
If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must
regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music
must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There
must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught
our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such
Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to
examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house; they must
not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may
say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness
in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies must be thought on;
there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall
prohibit them, shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their
visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to
the ballatry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the
countryman's Arcadias, and his Monte Mayors.
Next, what more national corruption, for which England hears ill abroad,
than household gluttony: who shall be the rectors of our daily rioting? And
what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes that frequent those houses
where drunkenness is sold and harboured? Our garments also should be
referred to the licensing of some more sober workmasters to see them cut
into a less wanton garb. Who shall regulate all the mixed conversation of
our youth, male and female together, as is the fashion of this country? Who
shall still appoint what shall be discoursed, what presumed, and no further?
Lastly, who shall forbid and separate all idle resort, all evil company? These
things will be, and must be; but how they shall be least hurtful, how least
enticing, herein consists the grave and governing wisdom of a state.
To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which
never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain

wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us
unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of books will do this, which
necessarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, as will
make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; but those
unwritten, or at least unconstraining, laws of virtuous education, religious
and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions as the bonds and ligaments of
the commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every written statute;
these they be which will bear chief sway in such matters as these, when all
licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and remissness, for certain, are the
bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies, to discern in what the
law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is
to work.
If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to be
under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a
name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be
sober, just, or continent? Many there be that complain of divine Providence
for suffering Adam to transgress; foolish tongues! When God gave him
reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had
been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We
ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force:
God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost
in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the
praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us,
pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very
ingredients of virtue?
They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to remove
sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap
increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for
a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a
universal thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains
entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one
jewel left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of
lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in
any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not hither so; such
great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point.
Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of

sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same;
remove that, and ye remove them both alike.
This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command us
temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a
profuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander
beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigour contrary to
the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scanting those means,
which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of virtue and the exercise
of truth? It would be better done, to learn that the law must needs be
frivolous, which goes to restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally
working to good and to evil. And were I the chooser, a dream of well-doing
should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of
evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one
virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.
And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or
conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is of the same effect that
writings are, yet grant the thing to be prohibited were only books, it appears
that this Order hitherto is far insufficient to the end which it intends. Do we
not see, not once or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against
the Parliament and City, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, and
dispersed among us, for all that licensing can do? Yet this is the prime
service a man would think, wherein this Order should give proof of itself. If
it were executed, you'll say. But certain, if execution be remiss or blindfold
now, and in this particular, what will it be hereafter and in other books? If
then the Order shall not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords
and Commons, ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed
books already printed and divulged; after ye have drawn them up into a list,
that all may know which are condemned, and which not; and ordain that no
foreign books be delivered out of custody, till they have been read over.
This office will require the whole time of not a few overseers, and those no
vulgar men. There be also books which are partly useful and excellent,
partly culpable and pernicious; this work will ask as many more officials, to
make expurgations and expunctions, that the commonwealth of learning be
not damnified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upon their
hands, ye must be fain to catalogue all those printers who are found
frequently offending, and forbid the importation of their whole suspected
typography. In a word, that this your Order may be exact and not deficient,

ye must reform it perfectly according to the model of Trent and Seville,
which I know ye abhor to do.
Yet though ye should condescend to this, which God forbid, the Order
still would be but fruitless and defective to that end whereto ye meant it. If
to prevent sects and schisms, who is so unread or so uncatechized in story,
that hath not heard of many sects refusing books as a hindrance, and
preserving their doctrine unmixed for many ages, only by unwritten
traditions? The Christian faith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown
to have spread all over Asia, ere any Gospel or Epistle was seen in writing.
If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain,
whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, the wiser, the
chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hath been executed upon
books.
Another reason, whereby to make it plain that this Order will miss the
end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be in every licenser. It
cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or
death of books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need
to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and
judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in the censure of what is
passable or not; which is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as
behooves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-
work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the
perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes.
There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain seasons; but to be
enjoined the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scarce legible,
whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an
imposition which I cannot believe how he that values time and his own
studies, or is but of a sensible nostril, should be able to endure. In this one
thing I crave leave of the present licensers to be pardoned for so thinking;
who doubtless took this office up, looking on it through their obedience to
the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all things seem easy and
unlaborious to them; but that this short trial hath wearied them out already,
their own expressions and excuses to them who make so many journeys to
solicit their licence are testimony enough. Seeing therefore those who now
possess the employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it;
and that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own hours,
is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put himself to the salary

of a press corrector; we may easily foresee what kind of licensers we are to
expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely
pecuniary. This is what I had to show, wherein this Order cannot conduce to
that end whereof it bears the intention.
I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt it causes,
in being first the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to
learning, and to learned men.
It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every least breath
of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more equally Church
revenues, that then all learning would be for ever dashed and discouraged.
But as for that opinion, I never found cause to think that the tenth part of
learning stood or fell with the clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a
sordid and unworthy speech of any churchman who had a competency left
him. If therefore ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the
mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous
sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not
for lucre or any other end but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps
that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have
consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the
good of mankind; then know that, so far to distrust the judgment and the
honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet
offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and
examiner, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption, is the
greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be
put upon him.
What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we
have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an Imprimatur; if
serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a
grammar-lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory
eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted
with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to
the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself
reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a fool or
a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason
and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and
likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done

he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ
before him. If, in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness,
no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that
state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry
all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings and expense of
Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his
younger, perhaps his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the
labour of bookwriting, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in
print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his
title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer, it cannot be but a
dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and
dignity of learning.
And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy, as to have many
things well worth the adding come into his mind after licensing, while the
book is yet under the press, which not seldom happens to the best and
diligentest writers; and that perhaps a dozen times in one book? The printer
dares not go beyond his licensed copy; so often then must the author trudge
to his leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a
jaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man, can either
be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the press must stand still,
which is no small damage, or the author lose his accuratest thoughts, and
send the book forth worse than he had made it, which to a diligent writer is
the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall.
And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching;
how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had better be
silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under
the correction of his patriarchal licenser to blot or alter what precisely
accords not with the hidebound humour which he calls his judgment? When
every acute reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be ready
with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him: I hate a
pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the
wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the licenser, but that I
have his own hand here for his arrogance; who shall warrant me his
judgment? The State, sir, replies the stationer, but has a quick return: The
State shall be my governors, but not my critics; they may be mistaken in the
choice of a licenser, as easily as this licenser may be mistaken in an author;
this is some common stuff; and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon,

THAT SUCH AUTHORIZED BOOKS ARE BUT THE LANGUAGE OF
THE TIMES. For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more
than ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession, yet his
very office and his commission enjoins him to let pass nothing but what is
vulgarly received already.
Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased author,
though never so famous in his lifetime and even to this day, come to their
hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted, if there be found in his book
one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal (and who
knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet not suiting
with every low decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself,
the reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him their
dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost, for the
fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a perfunctory licenser. And to
what an author this violence hath been lately done, and in what book of
greatest consequence to be faithfully published, I could now instance, but
shall forbear till a more convenient season.
Yet if these things be not resented seriously and timely by them who have
the remedy in their power, but that such iron-moulds as these shall have
authority to gnaw out the choicest periods of exquisitest books, and to
commit such a treacherous fraud against the orphan remainders of worthiest
men after death, the more sorrow will belong to that hapless race of men,
whose misfortune it is to have understanding. Henceforth let no man care to
learn, or care to be more than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters
to be ignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the
only pleasant life, and only in request.
And it is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive, and most
injurious to the written labours and monuments of the dead, so to me it
seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation. I cannot set so
light by all the invention, the art, the wit, the grave and solid judgment
which is in England, as that it can be comprehended in any twenty
capacities how good soever, much less that it should not pass except their
superintendence be over it, except it be sifted and strained with their
strainers, that it should be uncurrent without their manual stamp. Truth and
understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by
tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple

commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and licence it like our
broadcloth and our woolpacks. What is it but a servitude like that imposed
by the Philistines, not to be allowed the sharpening of our own axes and
coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges?
Had anyone written and divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest
life, misusing and forfeiting the esteem had of his reason among men, if
after conviction this only censure were adjudged him that he should never
henceforth write but what were first examined by an appointed officer,
whose hand should be annexed to pass his credit for him that now he might
be safely read; it could not be apprehended less than a disgraceful
punishment. Whence to include the whole nation, and those that never yet
thus offended, under such a diffident and suspectful prohibition, may
plainly be understood what a disparagement it is. So much the more,
whenas debtors and delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but
unoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title.
Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we be so
jealous over them, as that we dare not trust them with an English pamphlet,
what do we but censure them for a giddy, vicious, and ungrounded people;
in such a sick and weak state of faith and discretion, as to be able to take
nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser? That this is care or love of
them, we cannot pretend, whenas, in those popish places where the laity are
most hated and despised, the same strictness is used over them. Wisdom we
cannot call it, because it stops but one breach of licence, nor that neither:
whenas those corruptions, which it seeks to prevent, break in faster at other
doors which cannot be shut.
And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our ministers also, of
whose labours we should hope better, and of the proficiency which their
flock reaps by them, than that after all this light of the Gospel which is, and
is to be, and all this continual preaching, they should still be frequented
with such an unprincipled, unedified and laic rabble, as that the whiff of
every new pamphlet should stagger them out of their catechism and
Christian walking. This may have much reason to discourage the ministers
when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations, and the benefiting
of their hearers, as that they are not thought fit to be turned loose to three
sheets of paper without a licenser; that all the sermons, all the lectures
preached, printed, vented in such numbers, and such volumes, as have now
well nigh made all other books unsaleable, should not be armour enough

against one single Enchiridion, without the castle of St. Angelo of an
Imprimatur.
And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these
arguments of learned men's discouragement at this your Order are mere
flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen and heard in other
countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among
their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born
in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was,
while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which
learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the
glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many
years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the
famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in
astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.
And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the
prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that
other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope
that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders
to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time
that this world hath to finish. When that was once begun, it was as little in
my fear that what words of complaint I heard among learned men of other
parts uttered against the Inquisition, the same I should hear by as learned
men at home, uttered in time of Parliament against an order of licensing;
and that so generally that, when I had disclosed myself a companion of their
discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an honest
quaestorship had endeared to the Sicilians was not more by them
importuned against Verres, than the favourable opinion which I had among
many who honour ye, and are known and respected by ye, loaded me with
entreaties and persuasions, that I would not despair to lay together that
which just reason should bring into my mind, toward the removal of an
undeserved thraldom upon learning. That this is not therefore the
disburdening of a particular fancy, but the common grievance of all those
who had prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to advance
truth in others, and from others to entertain it, thus much may satisfy.
And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the
general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again and licensing, and
that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear

each book and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents
are; if some who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching
shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it
cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over
learning: and will soon put it out of controversy, that bishops and presbyters
are the same to us, both name and thing. That those evils of prelaty, which
before from five or six and twenty sees were distributively charged upon the
whole people, will now light wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us:
whenas now the pastor of a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be
exalted archbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but
keep his other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late cried down
the sole ordination of every novice Bachelor of Art, and denied sole
jurisdiction over the simplest parishioner, shall now at home in his private
chair assume both these over worthiest and excellentest books and ablest
authors that write them.
This is not, ye Covenants and Protestations that we have made! this is not
to put down prelaty; this is but to chop an episcopacy; this is but to translate
the Palace Metropolitan from one kind of dominion into another; this is but
an old canonical sleight of commuting our penance. To startle thus betimes
at a mere unlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of every
conventicle, and a while after will make a conventicle of every Christian
meeting. But I am certain that a State governed by the rules of justice and
fortitude, or a Church built and founded upon the rock of faith and true
knowledge, cannot be so pusillanimous. While things are yet not constituted
in religion, that freedom of writing should be restrained by a discipline
imitated from the prelates and learnt by them from the Inquisition, to shut
us up all again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubt
and discouragement to all learned and religious men.
Who cannot but discern the fineness of this politic drift, and who are the
contrivers; that while bishops were to be baited down, then all presses
might be open; it was the people's birthright and privilege in time of
Parliament, it was the breaking forth of light. But now, the bishops
abrogated and voided out of the Church, as if our Reformation sought no
more but to make room for others into their seats under another name, the
episcopal arts begin to bud again, the cruse of truth must run no more oil,
liberty of printing must be enthralled again under a prelatical commission of
twenty, the privilege of the people nullified, and, which is worse, the

freedom of learning must groan again, and to her old fetters: all this the
Parliament yet sitting. Although their own late arguments and defences
against the prelates might remember them, that this obstructing violence
meets for the most part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it
drives at: instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and
invests them with a reputation. The punishing of wits enhances their
authority, saith the Viscount St. Albans; and a forbidden writing is thought
to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the faces of them who seek to
tread it out. This Order, therefore, may prove a nursing-mother to sects, but
I shall easily show how it will be a step-dame to Truth: and first by
disenabling us to the maintenance of what is known already.
Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives
by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in
Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual
progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A
man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his
pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other
reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his
heresy.
There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another than
the charge and care of their religion. There be—who knows not that there
be?—of Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrant an implicit
faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure
and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many
piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going
upon that trade. What should he do? fain he would have the name to be
religious, fain he would bear up with his neighbours in that. What does he
therefore, but resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some
factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his
religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he
adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and
keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his
religion; esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and
commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now
no more within himself, but is become a dividual movable, and goes and
comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house. He
entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes

home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep;
rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced brewage, and
better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed
on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at
eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his
religion.
Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shall be
ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but what passes
through the custom-house of certain publicans that have the tonnaging and
poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will straight give themselves up into
your hands, make 'em and cut 'em out what religion ye please: there be
delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about
from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What
need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly
and so unalterably into their own purveying? These are the fruits which a
dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people.
How goodly and how to be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this,
what a fine conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and
solid piece of framework, as any January could freeze together.
Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergy
themselves. It is no new thing never heard of before, for a parochial
minister, who has his reward and is at his Hercules' pillars in a warm
benefice, to be easily inclinable, if he have nothing else that may rouse up
his studies, to finish his circuit in an English Concordance and a topic folio,
the gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony and a
Catena; treading the constant round of certain common doctrinal heads,
attended with their uses, motives, marks, and means, out of which, as out of
an alphabet, or sol-fa, by forming and transforming, joining and disjoining
variously, a little bookcraft, and two hours' meditation, might furnish him
unspeakably to the performance of more than a weekly charge of
sermoning: not to reckon up the infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries,
synopses, and other loitering gear. But as for the multitude of sermons
ready printed and piled up, on every text that is not difficult, our London
trading St. Thomas in his vestry, and add to boot St. Martin and St. Hugh,
have not within their hallowed limits more vendible ware of all sorts ready
made: so that penury he never need fear of pulpit provision, having where
so plenteously to refresh his magazine. But if his rear and flanks be not

impaled, if his back door be not secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold
book may now and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his old
collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to
stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about his received opinions,
to walk the round and counter-round with his fellow inspectors, fearing lest
any of his flock be seduced, who also then would be better instructed, better
exercised and disciplined. And God send that the fear of this diligence,
which must then be used, do not make us affect the laziness of a licensing
Church.
For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily,
which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and
frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding
rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a
conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we
know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but
openly by writing publish to the world what his opinion is, what his
reasons, and wherefore that which is now thought cannot be sound? Christ
urged it as wherewith to justify himself, that he preached in public; yet
writing is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need
be, there being so many whose business and profession merely it is to be the
champions of truth; which if they neglect, what can be imputed but their
sloth, or unability?
Thus much we are hindered and disinured by this course of licensing,
toward the true knowledge of what we seem to know. For how much it hurts
and hinders the licensers themselves in the calling of their ministry, more
than any secular employment, if they will discharge that office as they
ought, so that of necessity they must neglect either the one duty or the other,
I insist not, because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience,
how they will decide it there.
There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible loss
and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to; more than if some enemy
at sea should stop up all our havens and ports and creeks, it hinders and
retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth; nay, it was first
established and put in practice by Antichristian malice and mystery on set
purpose to extinguish, if it were possible, the light of Reformation, and to
settle falsehood; little differing from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds

his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing. 'Tis not denied, but gladly
confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to Heaven louder than most
of nations, for that great measure of truth which we enjoy, especially in
those main points between us and the Pope, with his appurtenances the
prelates: but he who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained
the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we
contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this
very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth.
Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a
perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his
Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of
deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his
conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth,
hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the
four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst
appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of
Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find
them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall
do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and
member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and
perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of
opportunity, forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that
continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.
We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us
into darkness. Who can discern those planets that are oft combust, and those
stars of brightest magnitude that rise and set with the sun, until the opposite
motion of their orbs bring them to such a place in the firmament, where
they may be seen evening or morning? The light which we have gained was
given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more
remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the
unmitring of a bishop, and the removing him from off the presbyterian
shoulders, that will make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in
the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not
looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that
Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There
be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a
calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own pride and

ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with
meekness, nor can convince; yet all must be suppressed which is not found
in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity,
who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which
are yet wanting to the body of Truth. To be still searching what we know
not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her
body is homogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in theology as
well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a Church; not the
forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds.
Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye
are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a
quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to
discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human
capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest
sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of
good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the
school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old
philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola,
who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural wits of Britain
before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the
grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from as far as the
mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian wilderness, not
their youth, but their staid men, to learn our language and our theologic arts.
Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we
have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and
propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other,
that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the
first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been
the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable
spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps
neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther or of
Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had
been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence
demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest
scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once
again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and
devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is

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

Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries; as
if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring
the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational
men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many
dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can
be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united
into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every
piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in
this, that, out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that
are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry
that commends the whole pile and structure.
Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual
architecture, when great reformation is expected. For now the time seems
come, wherein Moses the great prophet may sit in heaven rejoicing to see
that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our
seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets. No marvel
then though some men, and some good men too perhaps, but young in
goodness, as Joshua then was, envy them. They fret, and out of their own
weakness are in agony, lest these divisions and subdivisions will undo us.
The adversary again applauds, and waits the hour: when they have branched
themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties and partitions, then will
be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm root, out of which we all grow,
though into branches: nor will beware until he see our small divided
maniples cutting through at every angle of his ill-united and unwieldy
brigade. And that we are to hope better of all these supposed sects and
schisms, and that we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps, though
over-timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in the end at
those malicious applauders of our differences, I have these reasons to
persuade me.
First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, her
navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle
oft rumoured to be marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches, that
then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken
up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed,
should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a
rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues first
a singular goodwill, contentedness and confidence in your prudent foresight

and safe government, Lords and Commons; and from thence derives itself
to a gallant bravery and well-grounded contempt of their enemies, as if
there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as his was, who
when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that
piece of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his
own regiment.
Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory.
For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not
only to vital but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest
operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution
the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as
that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but
to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of
controversy and new invention, it betokens us not degenerated, nor
drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrinkled skin of
corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entering the
glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue, destined to become great and
honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and
puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking
her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty
youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging
and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly
radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those
also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in
their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.
What would ye do then? should ye suppress all this flowery crop of
knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city?
Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over it, to bring a famine
upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured to
us by their bushel? Believe it, Lords and Commons, they who counsel ye to
such a suppressing do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will
soon show how. If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free
writing and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own
mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and
Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased
us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath
rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that

which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions, degrees
above themselves.
Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing
of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the
lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again,
brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become
that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were
from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our
thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest
things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress
that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may
dispatch at will their own children. And who shall then stick closest to ye,
and excite others? not he who takes up arms for coat and conduct, and his
four nobles of Danegelt. Although I dispraise not the defence of just
immunities, yet love my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to
know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all
liberties.
What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful and so
unequal to suppress opinions for the newness or the unsuitableness to a
customary acceptance, will not be my task to say. I only shall repeat what I
have learned from one of your own honourable number, a right noble and
pious lord, who, had he not sacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church
and Commonwealth, we had not now missed and bewailed a worthy and
undoubted patron of this argument. Ye know him, I am sure; yet I for
honour's sake, and may it be eternal to him, shall name him, the Lord
Brook. He writing of episcopacy, and by the way treating of sects and
schisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of his dying charge,
which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard with ye, so full of
meekness and breathing charity, that next to his last testament, who
bequeathed love and peace to his disciples, I cannot call to mind where I
have read or heard words more mild and peaceful. He there exhorts us to
hear with patience and humility those, however they be miscalled, that
desire to live purely, in such a use of God's ordinances, as the best guidance
of their conscience gives them, and to tolerate them, though in some
disconformity to ourselves. The book itself will tell us more at large, being
published to the world, and dedicated to the Parliament by him who, both

for his life and for his death, deserves that what advice he left be not laid by
without perusal.
And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speak what may
help to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The temple of Janus
with his two controversial faces might now not unsignificantly be set open.
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to
misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth
put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and
surest suppressing. He who hears what praying there is for light and clearer
knowledge to be sent down among us, would think of other matters to be
constituted beyond the discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricked already
to our hands. Yet when the new light which we beg for shines in upon us,
there be who envy and oppose, if it come not first in at their casements.
What a collusion is this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man to use
diligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early and late, that
another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute? When a man
hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge,
hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage: drawn forth his reasons
as it were a battle ranged: scattered and defeated all objections in his way;
calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and
sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument: for his
opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of
licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in
soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth.
For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs
no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are
the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. Give her but
room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as
the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound,
but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps
tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she
be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it not impossible that she may have
more shapes than one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent,
wherein Truth may be on this side or on the other, without being unlike
herself? What but a vain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances,
that hand-writing nailed to the cross? What great purchase is this Christian

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

deed? and not consider this, that if it come to prohibiting, there is not aught
more likely to be prohibited than truth itself; whose first appearance to our
eyes, bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and
unplausible than many errors, even as the person is of many a great man
slight and contemptuous to see to. And what do they tell us vainly of new
opinions, when this very opinion of theirs, that none must be heard but
whom they like, is the worst and newest opinion of all others; and is the
chief cause why sects and schisms do so much abound, and true knowledge
is kept at distance from us; besides yet a greater danger which is in it.
For when God shakes a kingdom with strong and healthful commotions
to a general reforming, 'tis not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers
are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is, that God then raises to
his own work men of rare abilities, and more than common industry, not
only to look back and revise what hath been taught heretofore, but to gain
further and go on some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth. For
such is the order of God's enlightening his Church, to dispense and deal out
by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustain it.
Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place
these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees,
chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set
places, and assemblies, and outward callings of men; planting our faith one
while in the old Convocation house, and another while in the Chapel at
Westminster; when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized is
not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charity of patient
instruction to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest
Christian, who desires to walk in the Spirit, and not in the letter of human
trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though Harry
VII himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend them
voices from the dead, to swell their number.
And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics,
what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause,
that we do not give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we
debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent
audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? seeing no man who hath
tasted learning, but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who,
not contented with stale receipts, are able to manage and set forth new

positions to the world. And were they but as the dust and cinders of our feet,
so long as in that notion they may yet serve to polish and brighten the
armoury of Truth, even for that respect they were not utterly to be cast
away. But if they be of those whom God hath fitted for the special use of
these times with eminent and ample gifts, and those perhaps neither among
the priests nor among the Pharisees, and we in the haste of a precipitant zeal
shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear
they come with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly forejudge
them ere we understand them; no less than woe to us, while, thinking thus
to defend the Gospel, we are found the persecutors.
There have been not a few since the beginning of this Parliament, both of
the presbytery and others, who by their unlicensed books, to the contempt
of an Imprimatur, first broke that triple ice clung about our hearts, and
taught the people to see day: I hope that none of those were the persuaders
to renew upon us this bondage which they themselves have wrought so
much good by contemning. But if neither the check that Moses gave to
young Joshua, nor the countermand which our Saviour gave to young John,
who was so ready to prohibit those whom he thought unlicensed, be not
enough to admonish our elders how unacceptable to God their testy mood
of prohibiting is; if neither their own remembrance what evil hath abounded
in the Church by this set of licensing, and what good they themselves have
begun by transgressing it, be not enough, but that they will persuade and
execute the most Dominican part of the Inquisition over us, and are already
with one foot in the stirrup so active at suppressing, it would be no unequal
distribution in the first place to suppress the suppressors themselves: whom
the change of their condition hath puffed up, more than their late experience
of harder times hath made wise.
And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of
advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next
before this, "that no book be printed, unless the printer's and the author's
name, or at least the printer's, be registered." Those which otherwise come
forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the
executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's
prevention can use. For this authentic Spanish policy of licensing books, if I
have said aught, will prove the most unlicensed book itself within a short
while; and was the immediate image of a Star Chamber decree to that
purpose made in those very times when that Court did the rest of those her

pious works, for which she is now fallen from the stars with Lucifer.
Whereby ye may guess what kind of state prudence, what love of the
people, what care of religion or good manners there was at the contriving,
although with singular hypocrisy it pretended to bind books to their good
behaviour. And how it got the upper hand of your precedent Order so well
constituted before, if we may believe those men whose profession gives
them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there was in it the fraud of
some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of bookselling; who under
pretence of the poor in their Company not to be defrauded, and the just
retaining of each man his several copy, which God forbid should be
gainsaid, brought divers glossing colours to the House, which were indeed
but colours, and serving to no end except it be to exercise a superiority over
their neighbours; men who do not therefore labour in an honest profession
to which learning is indebted, that they should be made other men's vassals.
Another end is thought was aimed at by some of them in procuring by
petition this Order, that, having power in their hands, malignant books
might the easier scape abroad, as the event shows.
But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not. This I
know, that errors in a good government and in a bad are equally almost
incident; for what magistrate may not be misinformed, and much the
sooner, if liberty of printing be reduced into the power of a few? But to
redress willingly and speedily what hath been erred, and in highest
authority to esteem a plain advertisement more than others have done a
sumptuous bride, is a virtue (honoured Lords and Commons) answerable to
your highest actions, and whereof none can participate but greatest and
wisest men.

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