**A Pamphlet by [John Milton to Parliament, published in 1644](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html)**
*(Note: I have obtained the original text from Dartmouth college linked above, but I have modified spellings and substituted some vocabulary for modern readers, to make it at least a little easier to follow)*
> *This is true Liberty when free born men Having to advise the public may speak free, Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise,Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace; What can be juster in a State then this?*
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 endeavor, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds: Some with doubt of what will be the success, others with fear of what will be the censure; some with hope, others with confidence of what they have to speak. And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected; and likely might in these for most 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, then the joy and gratulation which it brings to all who wish and promote their Countries liberty; whereof this whole Discourse proposed will be a certain testimony, if not a Trophy. For this is not the liberty which wee 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 civill liberty attained, that wise men look for. To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that wee 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 bee 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 Gods 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 obligation upon the whole Realm to your indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckoned among the tardiest, and the most unwilling 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 shewing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two of these I have heretofore endeavored, rescuing the employment from him who went about to impair your merits with a trivial and malignant Encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine own acquittal, that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath been reserved opportunely to this occasion. For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on your proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainest advice is a kind of praising; for though I should affirm and hold by argument, that it would fare better with truth, with learning, and the Commonwealth, if one of your published Orders which I should name, were call’d in, yet at the same time it could not but much redound to the lustre of your mild and equal Government, when as private persons are hereby animated to think ye better pleas’d with public advice, then 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 hautiness of Prelates and cabin Counsellors that usurped of late, when as they shall observe ye in the midst of your Victories and successes more gently brooking written exceptions
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 shew both that love of truth which ye eminently profess, and that uprightness of your judgement which is not wont to be partial to your selves; 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 mans Copy to himself, or provides for the poor, I touch not, only wish they be not made pretenses to abuse and persecute honest and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars. But that other clause of Licensing Books, which we thought had died with his brother quadragesimal and matrimonial when the Prelates expired, I shall now attend with such a Homily, as shall lay before ye, first the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to own; next what is to be thought in general of reading, what ever sort the Books be; and that this Order avails nothing to the suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libelous Books, which were mainly intended to be suppressed. Last, that it will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of Truth, not only by dis-exercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil Wisdom.
I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how Books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons 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, Gods Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. ‘Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole Nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in Books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. But lest I should be condemned of introducing license, while I oppose Licensing, I refuse not the pains to be so much Historical, as will serve to shew 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 caught up by our Prelates, and hath caught some of our Presbyters.
In Athens where Books and Wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the Magistrate cared to take notice of; those either blasphemous and Atheistical, or Libellous. Thus the Books of Protagoras were by the Judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himself banished the territory for a discourse begun with his confessing not to know whether there were gods, or whether not: And against defaming, it was decreed that none should be traduced by name, as was the manner of Vetus Comœdia, 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 shew’d. 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 question’d 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 Chrysostome, as is reported, nightly studied so much the same Author and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the stile of a rousingSermon. That other leading city of Greece, Lacedæmon, considering that Lycurgus their Law-giver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scatter’d 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 muse-less and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats of War. There needed no licensing of Books among them for they disliked all, but their own Laconic Apophthegms, and took as light occasion to chase Archilochus out of their City, perhaps for composing in a higher strain then 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 Lacedæmonian guise, knew of learning little but what their twelve Tables, and the Pontifical College with their Augurs and Roman State Priests 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 Sabin austerity; honoured and admired the men; and the Censor himself at last in his old age fell to the study of that whereof before he was so scrupulous. And yet at the same time Nævius 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 don to libellous books and Authors; for Nævius was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, and released by the Tribunes upon his recantation: We read also that libels were burnt, and the makers punished by Augustus. The like severity no doubt was used if ought were impiously written against their esteemed gods. Excepting 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
By this time the Emperors were become Christians, whose discipline in this point I do not find to have been more severe then what was formerly in practice. The Books of those whom they took to be grand Heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned in the general Counsels; and not till then were prohibited, or burnt by authority of the Emperor. As for the writings of Heathen authors, unless they were plain invectives against Christianity, as those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with no interdict that can be cited, till about the year 400 in a Carthaginian Counsel, 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 Counsels andBishops were wont only to declare what Books were not commendable, passing no further, but leaving it to each ones conscience to read or to lay by, till after the year 800. is observed already by Padre Paolo the great unmasker of the Trentine Counsel. After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of Political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over mens eyes, as they had before over their judgements, 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 Wicklef and Husse 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 Counsel of Trent, and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth, or perfected those Catalogues, and expurgating Indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good Author, with a violation worse then 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 strait 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 2 or 3 glutton Friers. For example:
> *Let the Chancellor Cini be pleas’d to see if in this present workbe contain’d ought that may withstand the Printing.*
>
> Vincent Rabbatta, Vicar of Florence.
>
> *I have seen this present work, and finde nothing athwart the Catholick faith and good manners: in witness whereof I have given,* *&c**.*
>
> Nicolò Cini, Chancellor of Florence.
>
> *Attending the precedent relation, it is allow’d that this present work of Davanzati may be printed.*
>
> Vincent Rabbatta, &c.
>
> *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 barre 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. Voutsafe 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 Nicolò Rodolphi, Master of the holy Palace.
Sometimes 5 Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the Piazza of one Title page, complementing 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 Pauls; 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 anew to spell such a dictatory presumption in English. And thus ye have the Inventors and the original of book licensing ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient State, or polity, or Church, nor by any Statute left us by our Ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed City, or Church abroad; but from the most Anti-christian Counsel and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquired. Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cross-legged over the nativity of any mans intellectual off spring; but if it proved a Monster, who denies, but that it was justly burned, 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 borne to the World, and undergo yet in darkness the judgement of Radamanth and his Colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up, and so ill favoredly imitated by our inquisition-friendly 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 fore-borne to use it, and falsest seducers, and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation; I am of those who believe, it will be a harder alchemy then 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, what ever sort they be, and whether be more the benefit, or the harm that thence proceeds?
Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, & 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, not withstanding sometimes controverted among the Primitive Doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable, as was then evidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate, and subtlest enemy to our faith, made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning: for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the Christians were put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were fain as a man may say, to coin all the seven liberal Sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into diverse forms of Orations, Poems, Dialogues, even to the calculating of a new Christian grammar. But, saith the Historian Socrates, The providence of God provided better than the industry of 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 fantasm bred by the fever which had then seised him. For had an Angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms, & had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurrilous Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next to correct him only, and let so many more ancient Fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of The 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 more ancient than this tale of Jerome to the Nun Saint Eustochium, and besides has nothing of a fever in it. Dionysius Alexandrinus was about the year 240, a person of great name in the Church for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against heretics by being conversant in their Books; until a certain Presbyter laid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himself among those defiling volumes. The worthy man loath to give offence fell into a new debate with himself what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision sent from God, it is his own Epistle that so avers it, confirmed him in these words: Read any books what ever 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 un-apocryphal vision, said without exception, Rise Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to each mans discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not inapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the heal
Another reason, whereby to make it plain that this order will miss the end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be in every licenser. It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books whether they may be wafted into this world, or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not; which is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behooves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing Journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, then to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, often times huge volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain seasons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scars legible, whereof three pages 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 nostrils 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 license, 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 shew, 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 Prelats, upon every least breath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more equally Church revenues, that then all learning would be for ever dashed and discouraged. But as for that opinion, I never found cause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell with the Clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy speech of any Churchman who had a competency left him. If therefore ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end, but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance the good of mankind, then know, that so far to distrust the judgement & the honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and examiner, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption, is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him. What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferular [discipline ruler] to come under the fescue [pointing stick] 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 bettered 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 un-leisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgement, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing, and if he be not repulsed, or slighted, must appear in Print like a puny with his guardian, and his censors 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 most diligent 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; mean while either the Press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author loose his most accurate thoughts, & send the book forth worse then 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
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 judgement 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 popular 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 license it like our broad cloth, and our wool packs. What is it but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed the sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges. Had any one written and divulged erroneous things & 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 then a disgraceful punishment. Whence to include the whole Nation, and those that never yet thus offended, under such a diffident and suspicious prohibition, may plainly be understood what a disparagement it is. So much the more, when debtors and delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailor in their title. Nor is it to the common people less then 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 estate 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, when as in those Popish places where the Laity are most hated and despised the same strictness is used over them. Wisdom we cannot call it, because it stops but one breach of license, nor that neither; when as those corruptions which it seeks to prevent, break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut.
And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our Ministers also, of whose labours we should hope better, and of the proficiency which their flock reaps by them, then that after all this light of the Gospel which is, and is to be, and all this continual preaching, they should be still frequented with such an unprincipled, unedified, and common 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 unsalable, 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 mens 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 then 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, then the favorable 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 then silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guest 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 Prelacy which before from twenty-five or twenty-six Sees were distributively charged upon the whole people, will now light wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us: when as now the Pastor of a small unlearned Parish, on the sudden shall be exalted Archbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but keep his other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late cried down the sole ordination of every novice Batchelor of Art, and denied sole jurisdiction over the simplest Parishioner, shall now at home in his private chair assume both these over worthy stand the most excellent books and ablest authors that write them. This is not, Ye Covenants and Protestations that we have made, this is not to put down Prelacy, 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 awhile after will make a conventicle of every Christian meeting. But I am
Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his Pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would more gladly post off to another, then 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? Fein he would have the name to be religious, fein he would bear up with his neighbours in that. What does he therefore, but resolves to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some Divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a divisible [shared] 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, praises, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey wine, 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 tunaging and the poundaging of all free spoken truth, will straight give themselves up into your hands, mak’em & cut’em out what religion ye please; there be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly, and so unalterably into their own purveying. These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly, and how to be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would it starch us all into? Doubtless as staunch and solid piece of frame-work, 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](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/catena), treading the constant round of certain common doctrinal heads, attended with their uses, motives, marks and means, out of which as out of an alphabet or Solfège by forming and transforming, joining and dis-joining variously a little book-craft, and two hours meditation might furnish him unspeakably to the performance of more than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to reckon up the infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear. But as for the multitude of Sermons ready printed and piled up, on every text that is not difficult, our London trading St. Thomas in his vestry, and add to boot St. Martin, and St. Hugh, have not within their hallowed limits more vendible ware of all sorts ready made: so that penury he never need fear of Pulpit provision, having where so plenteously to refresh his magazine. But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his back door be not secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold book may now and then issue forth, and give the assault to some of his old collections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keep waking, to stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels about his received opinions, to walk the round and counter-round with his fellow inspectors, fearing lest any of his flock be seduced, who also then would be better instructed, better exercised and disciplined. And God send that the fear of this diligence which must then be us’d, doe 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 then preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be, there being so many whose business and profession merely it is, to be the champions of Truth; which if they neglect, what can be imputed but their sloth, or inability?
Thus much we are hindered and dis-inured 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 theirMinistry, more than any secular employment, if they will discharge that office as they ought, so that of necessity they must neglect either the one duty or the other, I insist not, because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience, how they will decide it there.
There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible loss, and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to, more then if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens and ports, and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our richest Merchandise, Truth: nay it was first established and put in practice by Anti-christian malice and mystery on set purpose to extinguish, if it were possible, the light of Reformation, and to settle falsehood; little differing from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds his Al-Quran, by the prohibition of Printing. ‘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 shew 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 strait 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 Masters 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 un-mitring 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 [Huldrych Zwingli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli) and Calvin hath beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims.’Tis their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meekness, nor can convince, yet all must be suppressed which is not found in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth. To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneous, and proportional), this is the golden rule in Theology as well as in Arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds.
Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is 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 judgement 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 civill 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 stayed men, to learn our language, and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favor and the love of heaven we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propounding towards us. Why else was this Nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Zion 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 [Wicklef](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html), to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had bin completely ours. But now, as our obdurate Clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and most backward 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, then 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 conversion. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies. We reckon more than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks, had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already. Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill deputed care of their Religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite into one general and brotherly search after Truth; could
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 then 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 good will, contentedness and confidence in your prudent foresight, and safe government, Lords and Commons; and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well grounded contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh besieged by Hanibal, being in the City, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hanibal 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 most solid and most sublime 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](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html): Methinks I see her as an Eagle cradling her mighty youth, and kindling her un-dazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and un-scaling 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 shew 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 human 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 rarified and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make your selves, 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 free’d us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may dispatch at will their own children. And who shall then stick closest to ye, and excite others? Not he who takes up arms for cote and conduct, and his four nobles of Danegeld. 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 learnt from one of your own honourable number, aright noble and pious Lord, who had he not sacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church and Commonwealth, we had not now missed and be waylaid a worthy and undoubted patron of this argument. Ye know him I am sure; yet I for honours 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 Gods Ordinances, as the best guidance of their conscience gives them, and to tolerate them, though in some disconformity to ourselves. The book itself will tell us more at large being published to the world, and dedicated to the Parliament by him who both for his life and for his death deserves, that what advice he left be not laid by without perusal.
And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speak what may help to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The temple of Janus with his two controversial faces might now not insignificantly 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 fabric’t already to our hands. Yet when the new light which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy, and oppose, if it come not first in at their casements. What a collusion is this, when as 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 ambush, 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 licensing to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, & 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 & 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 then one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike her self. 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 strong hold 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 grip of custom, we care not to keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We doe 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 sub-dichotomies 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 th
There have bin 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 they themselves have begun by transgressing it, be not enough, but that they will persuade, and execute the most Dominican part of the Inquisition over us, and are already with one foot in the stirrup so active at suppressing, it would be no unequal distribution in the first place to suppress the suppressors themselves; whom the change of their condition hath puffed up, more then 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 then your selves have done in that Order published next before this, that no book be Printed, unless thePrinters and the Authors name, or at least the Printers 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 mans 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 book-selling; 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 diverse glossing colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving to no end except it be to exercise a superiority over their neighbours, men who do not therefore labour in an honest profession to which learning is indebted, that they should be made other mens 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 shews. 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 (honour’d Lords and Commons) answerable to Your highest actions, and whereof none can participate but greatest and wisest men.
