Areopagitica (1644)
John Milton
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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?
|
Hey, 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.
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.
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 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.
Typed by Judy Boss in Omaha, Nebraska.
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