[자료]Areopagitica 영어 원문

[박상익]

Areopagitica 영어 원문  

제가 번역한 <아레오파기티카>의 영어 원문을 올립니다.
영어를 읽으시는 분들에게 혹 도움이  될지 모르겠군요.
단, 현대 영어와 크게 달라서 읽기가 쉽지는 않습니다.

이거 번역할 때 한 문장 갖고 끙끙 앓으며 온종일 씨름한 날이 부지기수였습니다.-.-;
OED(Oxford English Dictionary)가 없이는 도저히 번역할 수 없는 문장도 많습니다.
온갖 영어사전을 다 뒤져도 안나오는 단어가 오직 OED에만 나오더군요.
(예를 들면 'inquisiturient' 같은 단어...)

밀턴이 워낙 라틴어에 조예가 깊어서 없는 영어 단어를 만들어서 쓰곤 했거든요.
마치 옛날 한학에 밝은 선비가 새로운 단어를 지어내듯이...

<아레오파기티카>는 종교개혁 문서죠?

그리고 OED는 명실상부한 'The Greatest Dictionary of the World' 입니다.
단어 하나하나마다 단어의 의미변천 과정이 예문과 더불어 실려 있습니다.
영어의 모든 단어의 역사가 사전 속에 담겨 있습니다.
실로 놀라운 사전입니다.

<교수와 광인>이란 책을 보시면 19세기 후반 OED 만드는 과정이 흥미진진하게 서술되어 있습니다.
저는 OED를 보면서 영국의 문화적 저력을 느낍니다.
우리에게도 이런 사전이 있으면 얼마나 좋을까요?
한글이 세계에서 가장 과학적이라고 자랑만 하지 말고,
OED에 필적하는 사전도 하나 만들었으면 좋겠습니다.

...
하지만 금세기에는 나올 것 같지 않군요.
(제가 너무 비관적인 걸까요?  -.-;)

                               AREOPAGITICA
                      1644
                 by John Milton

                                AREOPAGITICA
                           
       A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING,

            TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND (1644)


 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

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 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 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 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

democraty 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 worse 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 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 loth 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 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 licence, 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 agreed 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 them; for they disliked all but their own

laconic apothegms, 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 what 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 all 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 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 Cini, Chancellor of Florence.


   Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this present

     work of Davanzati may be printed.

                                              Vincent Rabbatta, etc.


       It may be printed, July 15.

                      Friar Simon Mompei d'Amelia, Chancellor of the

                                            holy office in Florence.


 Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long

since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I

fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing

of that which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with.

Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp:


   Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend master of the holy

     Palace.

                                              Belcastro, Vicegerent.


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


 Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the

piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with

their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in

perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the

sponge. These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear

antiphonies, that so bewitched of late our Prelates and their

chaplains with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to the gay

imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from

the west end of Paul's; so apishly romanising, 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 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 bells 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 minorities 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 be 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

foreborne 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 alchymy 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 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 first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for

scurril Plautus, 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, loth

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 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 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 fill 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

wayfaring 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 into the first rank of prohibited books. The ancientest

fathers must be next removed, as Clement of Alexandria, and that

Eusebian book of Evangelic preparation, transmitting our ears

through a hoard of heathenish obscenities to receive the Gospel. Who

finds not that Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others discover

more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is

the truer opinion?

 Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers of

greatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up

the life of human learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, so

long as we are sure those languages are known as well to the worst

of men, who are both most able, and most diligent to instil the poison

they suck, first into the courts of princes, acquainting them with the

choicest delights and criticisms of sin. As perhaps did that Petronius

whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his revels; and the

notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded and yet dear to the Italian

courtiers. I name not him for posterity's sake, whom Henry VIII. named

in merriment his Vicar of hell. By which compendious way all the

contagion that foreign books can infuse will find a passage to the

people far 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 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 not 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 an 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 recreations 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 thither 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 commands

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

learnthat the law must needs be frivolous, which goes to restrain

things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to evil. And

were I the chooser, a dram 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

uncatechised 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 behoves 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

would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an imposition 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 loth to dishearten heartily 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 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 temporising and extemporising

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 far 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 authorised 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 late 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 as 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 monopolised 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 tyrannises;

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 add 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 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," said 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 stepdame 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 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 resolve 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 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 the 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 it 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 proposed to lay open, the incredible

loss and detriment that this plot of incensing 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 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 learnour language and our

theologic arts.

 Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven,

we Pave 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 Huss 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 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-reputed 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 forego 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 if 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 be ware 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

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 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 despatch

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 wordly 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 We 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. 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 meantime 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 licence

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

contemptible 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 while in the old Convocation house, and another

while in the Chapel at Westminster; when all the faith and religion

that shall be there canonised 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 meeting

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

let of licensing, and what good in they themselves have begun by

transgressing it, be not enough, but that they will persuade and

execute the most Dominican part 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 enquire most, it may be

doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees and

monopolisers 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 glosing 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 bribe, is a virtue (honoured Lords and Commons) answerable

to your highest actions, and whereof none can participate but greatest

and wisest men.

                                   THE END

[우산]

찾았어요! 문장 길이를 이렇게 조절하신 이유가 있으셨는지요...?
제가 영어도 짧은뎅...여기 문장이 짤막짤막 줄 바꾸기가 되어 있어서 읽기가 힘드네요ㅜㅜ
공유해서 문장 붙이기 시도해보고...다시 읽어볼게요! 감사합니다!!!!!!!!!!^^*

[박상익]

저도 긁어온거라서요...ㅎㅎ
제가 읽어본 가장 어려운 영어 중 하나라는....ㅠㅠ

[우산]

넹, 역문도 없이 영문을 읽을 수 있을지ㅜㅜ
실락원 원서는 두껍나요? 밀턴이 최악의 상황에서 쓴 작품이라니 눈물이 날 것만 같네요......

[박상익]

제가 번역한 책이 지금은 절판이 됐는데,
당장은 어렵지만
차후 수정 재출간할 계획이 있습니다.^^

[우산]

오메 어째야쓰까, 절판......ㅠㅠ
이 무슨 옥타비아 파스의 '활과 리라' 같은 소리래유?
제가 그 책도 구하느라 엄청스레 고생했는뎅.

[박상익]

새책 정가 15,000원짜린데, 헌책을 25,000원에 팔고 있더군요...^^;;;

[우산]

플리즈, 재출간 언능언능!!^^*
땡큐 붸리 머치 인 어드밴스!!!ㅎㅎ

[박상익]

ㅎㅎㅎ