 Section I of Areopagitica. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Moira Fogarty. Areopagitica by John Milton. Section I. Areopagitica. 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? Euripides high-setted. They who to states and governors of the Commonwealth direct their speech, High Court of Parliament, or wanting such access in a private condition, write that which they foresee may advance the public good. I suppose them, as at the beginning of no mean endeavour, not a little altered, and moved inwardly in their minds, some with doubt of what will be the success, others with fear of what will be the censure, some with hope, others with confidence of what they have to speak, and me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected and likely might in these foremost expressions now also disclose which of them swayed most. But that the very attempt of this address, thus made, and the thought of whom it hath recourse to, hath got the power within me to a passion far more welcome than incidental to a preface. Which though I stay not to confess ere any ask, I shall be blameless, if it be no other than the joy and gratulation which it brings to all who wish and promote their country's liberty, whereof this whole discourse proposed will be a certain testimony, if not a trophy. For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth. That let no man in this world expect. But when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for. To which, if I now manifest by the very sound of this, which I shall utter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition, grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will be attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God our deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom, lords and commons of England. Neither is it in God's esteem the diminution of his glory, when honourable things are spoken of good men and worthy magistrates. Which, if I now first should begin to do, after so fair a progress of your laudable deeds, and such a long obligement upon the whole realm to your indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckoned among the tardiest and the unwillingest of them that praise ye. Nevertheless, there being three principal things, without which all praising is but courtship and flattery. First, when that only is praised, which is solidly worth praise. Next, when greatest likelihoods are brought, that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed. The other, when he who praises, by showing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not. The former two of these I have here too fore-endevered, rescuing the employment from him who went about to impair your merits, the latter, as belonging chiefly to my known 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 loyalist 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 redown to the luster of your mind and equal government, when as private persons are hereby animated to think ye better pleased with public advice than other statists have been delighted here to fore 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 councillors that you serped of late, when as 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 have 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 demeanor of your civil and gentle greatness, lords and commons, as what your published order hath directly said, that to gain say 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 esteemate 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 signuries heard them gladly and with great respect, if they had ought in public to admonish the State. Thus did Dion Pruseus, a stranger and a private orator, counsel the Rodians 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 happily 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 receive 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 so ever 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 want 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 there too 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 pretenses 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 libelous 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 vile the purist efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragons' teeth, and being sewn 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 libelous. Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himself banished to 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 Vitus Comedia, whereby we may guess how they censured libeling. 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 not but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for they disliked all but their own laconic apothecums, and took a slight occasion to chase Archilocus 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 that they were as disillute 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. End of Section 1 Recording by Moira Fogarty in Toronto, Canada June 2008 Section 2 of Areopagitica This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Moira Fogarty Areopagitica by John Milton The Romans also, for many ages, trained up only to a military roughness resembling most the Lacedaemonian guys, 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 Carnades 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 Navius 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 libelous books and authors, for Navius 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 ought 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 Flassus 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 Neso was by him banished in his old age for the wanton poems of his youth was but a mere covert of state and clause. 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 of discipline in this point I do not find to have been more severe than what was formally 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 Porphyrios and Proclus they met with no interdict till about the year 400 in a Carthaginian council wherein bishops themselves were forbidden 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 want 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 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 Wycliffe and Huss growing terrible were they who first drove the papal court to a stricter policy of prohibiting which course Leo 10 and his successors followed until the council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth perfected those catalogs 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 palette 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 Sinney be pleased to see if in this present work be contained ought that may withstand the printing Vincent Rabata, vicar of Florence I have seen this present work and find nothing a thwart the Catholic faith in good manners in witnessware of I have given etc Nicolo Geni, Chancellor of Florence attending the precedent relation it is allowed that this present work of Davazatti may be printed Vincent Rabata, etc it may be printed July 15 friar Simon Mompay D'Amelia Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence sure they have a conceit if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended but went not through with vouchsafe to see another of their forms the Roman stamp imprimatur if it seem good to the reverend master of the Holy Palace Belcastro Vice-Jerrant imprimatur friar Nicolo Rodolfi master of the Holy Palace sometimes five imprimatures 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 responsibilities these are the dear antiphanies that so bewitched of late 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 a now to spell such a dictatory presumption English and thus you have the inventors and the original of book licensing ripped up and drawn as linearly 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 counsel 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 the obvious 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 peckened soul should be to stand before a jury Eret be born to the world and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues Eret can pass the fairy backward into light before till that mysterious iniquity provoked and troubled at the first entrance of reformation sought out new limboes and new hells wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned and this was the rare morsel so officially snatched up and so ill favoritly imitated by our inquisitoriant bishops and the attendant minorities their chaplains that you like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts when you were importuned the passing it all men who know the integrity of your actions and how ye honor 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 foreborn to use it and falsest seducers and oppressors of men with 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 Lelius 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 then proceeds on the examples of Moses Daniel and Paul who were skillful 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 heath and 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 Apollonari were feign, as a man may say to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible reducing it into diverse 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 Apollonarius and his son by taking away that illiterate law 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 Dessias or Diocletian and perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil whipped Saint Jerome in a Lenten dream for reading Cicero or else it was a phantasm bred by the fever which had 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 floored bodies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition in so much that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of Margitas 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 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 want 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 a right and to examine each matter to this revelation he ascended the sooner as he confesses because it was answerable to that 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 meat and foods 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 and will lead good nourishment in the healthiest concoction but here in the differences 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 you 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 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. End of Section 2 Recorded in Toronto, Ontario by Moira Fogarty June 2008 Section 3 of Areopagitica this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Moira Fogarty Areopagitica by John Milton Section 3 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 demeanor 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 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 aphesian 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 and he said these men practiced 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 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 continents 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 which 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 Spencer whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas describing true temperance under the person of Gion 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 off times relates blasphemy not nicely it describes the carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly it brings in holiest men infinitely 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 carry 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 papest must be next removed as Clement of Alexandria and that Eusebian book of evangelical preparation transmitting our ears through a horde of heathenish obscenities to receive the gospel who finds not that Iranias, Epiphanias, 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 instill the poison they suck first into the courts of princes acquainting them with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin and 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 Cateau 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 licensor it will be hard to instance where any ignorant man has been ever seduced by 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 and 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 disillute may quickly be conveyed and that evil manners are as perfectly learned 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 caughtless 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 of books and his spreaders both of vice and error how shall the licences 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 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 a sacred scripture to his 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 and deed 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 burgamasters 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 an act 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 the Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined and to no other is evident why was he not also law-giver 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 Sophromimus and Aristophanes books of grossest infamy and also for commending the latter of them though he were the malicious libeler 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-apness to corrupt the mind that single endeavor they knew would be but a fond labor to shut and fortify one gate against corruption and be necessitated to leave others round about wide open This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Moira Fogarty. Ario Pijitica by John Milton Section 4 If we think to regulate printing thereby directify 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 licensors to examine all the loots, 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 magicles that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies must be thought on. There are shrewd books with dangerous frontispieces set to sail. Who shall prohibit them? Shall twenty licensors? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to the balletry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countrymen's arcadias and his Monty-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 can never 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 alluded. 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 grammarcy to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be the 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. Therefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue. They are not skillful 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 in tire. 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 you remove them both alike. This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command us temperance, continents, 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 rigor 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, you must repeal and prescribe 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 damnedified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upon their hands, ye must be feigned 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 effective to that end where two ye meant it. If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so unread or so uncatacised 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's scruple the better, the Honestor, the Wiser, the Chaster, since all the inquisitional rigor 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 licensor. 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, oft times 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 licensors 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 weary 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 licensors 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 learn it men. It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every leased breath of emotion, to remove pluralities, and distribute more equally church revenues, that then all learning would be forever 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 assorted 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 ingenious 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. End of Section 4. What advantages 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 there 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 licensor? 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 unlesured licensor, perhaps much as younger, perhaps his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book writing. 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 insurity 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 licence copy, so often then must the author trudge to his leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed, and many a jump will be made, ere that licensor, 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 accurateest 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, when as all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal licensor to blot, or alter, what precisely accords not with the hide-bound 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 quartz 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 licensor, 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 licensor, as easily as this licensor may be mistaken in an author. This is some common stuff. And he might add from Sir Francis Bacon, that such authorised books are but the language of the times. For though a licensor 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 knocks 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 licensor. 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 exquisite 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 desisteme 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 so ever, much less that it should not pass except their superintendents 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 license it like our broadcloth and our wool-packs. What is it but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines not to be allowed the sharpening of our own axes and coltors, 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. Wants 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, when as debtors and delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unaffensive 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 licensor. That this is care or love of them we cannot pretend, when as 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 license, nor that neither, when as those corruptions which it seeks to prevent, break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut. And in conclusion it reflects to the disresput 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 licensor, 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 unsailable, should not be armor enough against one single Ankeridian without the castle of St. Angelo of an imprimatur. And lest some should persuad 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 it was which adamped the glory of Italian wits, that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustion. 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 licensors thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prolactical 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 worthy's 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 quaystorship had endeared to the Sicilians was not more by them importuned against Varys 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 thralldom upon learning, that this is not therefore the disburning 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 prelity which before from five or six and twenty seas were distributively charged upon the whole people will now light wholly upon learning is not obscure to us, when as 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 overworthiest and excellent books and ablest authors that write them. This is not ye covenants and protestations that we have made. This is not to put down prelity. 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 slate of commuting our penance. To startle thus but times at a mere unlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of every conventical and a while after will make a conventical 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 licensor 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 fourth 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 crews of truth must run no more oil liberty of printing must be enthralled again under a political 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 late their own arguments and defenses 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 invest them with a reputation the punishing of wits enhances their authority say at 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 in 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 end of section five recording by Moira Fogarty Toronto Canada June 2008 section six of Areopagitica this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Moira Fogarty Areopagitica by John Milton section six there is not any burden that some would gladly or 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 aren't an implicit faith as any papest 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 feign he would have the name to be religious feign he would bear up with his neighbors 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 has become a divisual 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 praise is liberally sucked and sumptuously laid to sleep rises is saluted and after the Malmsey or some well spiced brewedge 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 them and cut them out what religion you 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 own knowledge will bring forth among the people how goodly and how to be wished we're 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 benefits 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 graduate ship 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 soul far by forming and transforming joining and disjoining variously a little book craft 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 saint thomas in his vestry and add to boot saint martin and saint hugh have not within their hallowed limits more vendable where of all sorts ready made so that penury he never need fear of pulpit provision having where so plentiously to refresh his magazine but if his rear and flanks be not impaled if his back door be not secured by the rigid licensor 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 count around 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 gating route what can be more fair than when a man judicious learned and of a conscience for ought we know as good as theirs that taught us what we know shall not privilege from house to house which is more dangerous but openly by writing published to the world what his opinion is what his reasons and where for 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 inability thus much we are hindered and disinhered by this course of licensing toward the true knowledge of what we seem to know for how much it hurts and hinders the licensors 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 purpose 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 anti-christian 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 Al-Quran by the prohibition of printing it is 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 be a tific 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 shall ever do till her master's second coming he shall bring together every joint and member and shall mold 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 unmitering 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 Zwinglius and Calvin have 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 descents from their maxims to 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 deceivered 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 homogeneous 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 where of ye are and where of 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 ableist 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 labored 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 hercenean wilderness not their youth but their staid men to learn our language and our theologic arts yet that which is above all this the favor 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 scion 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 wickliffe to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator perhaps neither the bohemian huns and gerome no nor the name of luther or of calvin had ever been known the glory of reforming all our neighbors 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 councils 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 their more anvils and hammers waking to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice and defense of beleaguered truth then there be pens and heads there sitting by their studious lamps musing searching revolving new notions and ideas were with to present as with their homage and their faulty the approaching reformation others as fast reading trying all things assenting to the force of reason and commencement 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 laborers to make a knowing people a nation of profits 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 when there is much desire to learn thereof 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 should rather 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 diligence is to join and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth could we but forgo this prolactical tradition of crowding free consciences and christian liberties into cannons and precepts of men i doubt not if some great and worthy stranger should come among us wise to discern the mold 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 peristed admiring the roman facility 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 sectories 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 sayeth 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 overtimerous 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 in battle oft rumored 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 in admiration things not before discoursed or written of argues first a singular good will 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 his 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 where on 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 acutist 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 honorable in these latter ages mithinks i see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks mithinks 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 gavel 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 and grocers 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 to 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 councils have purchased us liberty which is the nurse of all great wits this is that which hath rarified and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven this is that which hath enfranchised enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves end of section six recording by moira fogarty toronto canada june 2008