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Areopagitica: Part IV
Areopagitica: Part IV
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^122 Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for
Caesar, preferred the natural wits of Britain, before the labored studies of
the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transilvanian
sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond
the Hercynian^123 wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to learn
our language, and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the
favor and the love of heaven we have great argument to think in a peculiar
manner propitious and propending^124 toward 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 Wyclif, 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
neighbors had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with
violence demeaned ^125 the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the
backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now
once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy
and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is
decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the
reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then but reveal Himself to his
servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen; I say as his manner
is, first to us, though we mark not the method of his counsels, and are
unworthy. Behold now this vast city; a city of refuge, the mansion house of
liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath
not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and
instruments of armed justice in defense 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
laborers, 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^126 terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the
earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath
stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at,
should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill
deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous
prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might
win all these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherly
search after truth; could we but 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 mold and temper of a people, and how to govern it, observing the
high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended^127 thoughts and
reasonings in the persuance 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 sectarians; 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 can not
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 those 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, than will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm root, out of
which we all grow, though into branches: nor will beware until he sees our
small divided maniples^128 cutting through at every angle of his ill united
and unwiedly 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 his behalf, but shall laugh in the
end, at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have these reasons
to persuade me.
[Footnote 122: Cultivated.]
[Footnote 123: Used of the German forests.]
[Footnote 124: Inclining.]
[Footnote 125: Conducted.]
[Footnote 126: Imaginary.]
[Footnote 127: Advanced.]
[Footnote 128: Companies.]
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 rumored to be marching up even to her walls, and suburb trenches, that
then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken
up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, should
be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a
rarity,^129 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^130 to a gallant bravery and well grounded contempt of their enemies,
as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as his was,
who when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal being in the city, bought that
piece of ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own
regiment. Next it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and
victory. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and
vigorous, not only to vital, but to rational faculties, and those in the
acutest, and the pertest^131 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 betoken us not
degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and
wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again,
entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous virtue destined to become
great and honorable in these latter ages. 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 muing^132
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^133 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.
[Footnote 129: Rare degree.]
[Footnote 130: Flows on.]
[Footnote 131: Sprightliest.]
[Footnote 132: Renewing (by moulting).]
[Footnote 133: Noisy band.]
What should 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 ingrossers^134 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 can not 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 can not
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 ye then must first become that which ye can
not 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 great and exact things, is the issue of your
own virtue propagated in us; ye can not 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 cote and conduct,^135 and his four nobles of
Danegelt.^136 Although I dispraise not the defense 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.
[Footnote 134: Monopolists.]
[Footnote 135: i.e., to resist illegal taxation for clothing and conveying
troops.]
[Footnote 136: i.e., ship-money. The references here are to those who took up
arms in the civil war rather than submit to the illegal taxes of Charles I.]
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 honorable number, a right noble and pious
lord, who had he not sacrificed his life and fortunes to the church and
commonwealth, we had not now missed and bewailed a worthy and undoubted
patron of this argument. Ye know him I am sure; yet I for honor`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 honored 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 can not call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild
and peaceful. He there exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those,
however they be miscalled, that desire to live purely, in such a use of God`s
ordinances, as the best guidance of their conscience gives them, and to
tolerate them, though in some disconformity to ourselves. The book itself will
tell us more at large being published to the world, and dedicated to the
Parliament by him who both for his life and for his death deserves, that what
advice he left be not laid by without perusal.
And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speak what may
help to the further discussion of matters in agitation. The temple of Janus
with his two controversial faces might now not unsignificantly be set
open.^137 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,^138 framed and fabricated
already to our hands. Yet when the new light which we beg for shines in upon
us, there be who envy, and oppose, if it come not first in at their
casements. What a collusion is this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man
to use diligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early and late,
that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute. When a man
hath been laboring the hardest labor 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 valor 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,
no stratagems, no licensings to make her victorious, those are the shifts
and the defenses 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 handwriting 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 hyprocrisy 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^139
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 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^140 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 can not 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 extirpated, provided first that
all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and
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 neighboring differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of,
whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which though they may be
many, yet need not interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among
us the bond of peace. In the meanwhile if any one would write, and bring his
helpful hand to the slow-moving reformation we labor under, if truth have
spoken to him before others, or but seemed at least to speak, who hath so
be-Jesuited^141 us that we should trouble that man with asking license to do
so worthy a deed? and not consider this, that if it come to prohibiting,
there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself; whose
first appearance to our eyes bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom,
is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors, even as the person is of
many a great man slight and 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 sectarians and false teachers
are then busiest in seducing; but yet more true it is, that God then raises
to his own work men of rare abilities, and more than common industry, not
only to look back and revise what hath been taught heretofore, but to gain
further and go on, some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth. For
such is the order of God`s enlightening his church, to dispense and deal out
by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustain it. Neither is
God appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen
shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as
man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places, and
assemblies, and outward callings of men; planting our faith one while in the
old convocation house,^142 and another while in the chapel at
Westminster;^143 when all the faith and religion that shall be there
canonized,^144 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 the Seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs^145 about
him, should lend them voices from the dead, to swell their number. And if the
men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismatics, what withholds us
but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we do not
give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and
examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for
their sakes, yet for our own? seeing no man who hath tasted learning, but
will confess the many ways of profiting by those who not contented with stale
receipts are able to manage, and set forth new positions to the world. And
were they but as the dust and cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion
they may serve to polish and brighten the armor 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.
[Footnote 137: Indicating a time of war.]
[Footnote 138: The Presbyterian system.]
[Footnote 139: Priestly vestments.]
[Footnote 140: Subdivisions.]
[Footnote 141: Made Jesuits of.]
[Footnote 142: Where the Episcopal clergy met to legislate.]
[Footnote 143: Where the Presbyterian divines drew up their Confession.]
[Footnote 144: Put into canons or rules.]
[Footnote 145: In Westminster Abbey.]
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
condemning. 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^146 of
licensing, and what good they themselves have begun by transgressing it, be
not enough, but that they will persuade, and execute the most Dominican part
of the Inquisition over us, and are already with one foot in the stirrup so
active at suppressing, it would be no unequal distribution in the first place,
to suppress the suppressors themselves; whom the change of their condition
hath puffed up, more than their late experience of harder times hath made
wise.
[Footnote 146: Hindrance.]
And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honor 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 libelous, 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 you 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 behavior. And how it got the upper hand
of your precedent order so well constituted before, if we may believe those
men whose profession gives them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there
was in it the fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of
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 divers glozing colors^147 to the house,
which were indeed but colors, and serving to no end except it be to exercise a
superiority over their neighbors, men who do not therefore labor 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^148 books
might the easier escape abroad, as the event shows. But of these sophisms and
elenchs of merchandise I skill not:^149 This I know, that errors in a good
government and in a bad are equally almost incident;^150 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 (honored Lords and Commons),
answerable to^151 your highest actions, and whereof none can participate but
greatest and wisest men.
[Footnote 147: Plausible pretexts.]
[Footnote 148: Royalist.]
[Footnote 149: I have no knowledge of these tricks of trade and the exposure
of them.]
[Footnote 150: Liable to occur.]
[Footnote 151: Consistent with.]
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