Areopagitica
> This is true liberty: when freeborn citizens > Who have advice for the public may speak freely. > Whoever can and will deserves high praise; > Whoever neither can nor will may remain silent. > What could be more just in a state than this?
Euripides
Those who address their speeches to states and governors of the commonwealth, High Court of Parliament, or who, lacking such access and living as private citizens, write what they foresee may advance the public good, are engaged, I suppose, in no small undertaking. From the outset, their minds are deeply stirred: some by doubt about the outcome, others by fear of the judgment; some by hope, others by confidence in what they have to say.
Perhaps each of these dispositions has affected me at different times, according to the subject I was taking up. Even now, these opening words might reveal which feeling most strongly influenced me, except that the very attempt to make this address, and the thought of those to whom it appeals, have awakened in me a passion far more welcome than any ordinarily found in a preface. Though I do not hesitate to acknowledge it before anyone asks, I will be blameless if it is nothing other than the joy and rejoicing it brings to all who desire and promote their country’s liberty. This whole proposed discourse will be a sure testimony to that liberty, if not a trophy of it.
For the liberty we can hope for is not that no grievance should ever arise in the commonwealth. Let no one in this world expect that. But when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and quickly remedied, the highest degree of civil liberty that wise people look for has been attained.
If the very sound of what I am about to say shows that we have already made substantial progress toward that liberty, despite beginning at the steep disadvantage of a tyranny and superstition so deeply rooted in our principles that overcoming it was beyond even Roman courage, the achievement will first be attributed, as is most fitting, to the mighty help of God our deliverer, and next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom, Lords and Commons of England.
Nor does God consider his glory diminished when honorable things are said about good people and worthy magistrates. If I were only now beginning to praise you, after such admirable progress in your praiseworthy deeds, and after the whole realm has so long been indebted to your tireless virtues, I might justly be counted among the slowest and most reluctant of those who commend you.
Nevertheless, there are three essential elements without which all praise is merely courtliness and flattery. First, only what is truly worthy should be praised. Second, the strongest available evidence should be given that the qualities praised genuinely exist in the people to whom they are attributed. Third, whoever offers praise should demonstrate that what he writes expresses his actual conviction about those he praises, and thus show that he is not flattering them.
I have previously attempted the first two, rescuing the work of praise from one who tried to diminish your merits with a trivial and malicious encomium. The third, because it chiefly concerns my own acquittal from the charge of flattery, has been fittingly reserved for this occasion. Whoever freely magnifies what has been nobly done, yet does not fear to declare just as freely what might be done better, gives you the strongest assurance of his fidelity and shows that his most loyal affection and hope attend your proceedings. His highest praise is not flattery, and his plainest advice is itself a kind of praise.
For though I should affirm and establish by argument that truth, learning, and the commonwealth would fare better if one of your published orders, which I will name, were recalled, that very argument could only add to the honor of your mild and equitable government. Private citizens would thereby be encouraged to believe that you take greater pleasure in public advice than other statesmen have formerly taken in public flattery.
People will then see the difference between the magnanimity of a triennial Parliament and the jealous arrogance of the prelates and private councilors who lately usurped power. They will observe that, in the midst of your victories and successes, you bear written objections to an order you have voted more gently than other courts, which had produced nothing memorable except a feeble display of wealth, would have endured even the slightest sign of displeasure at one of their sudden proclamations.
If, Lords and Commons, I presume so far upon the meek temper of your civil and gracious greatness as to oppose what your published order has directly commanded, I can easily defend myself against anyone who accuses me of novelty or insolence, if only they know how much more highly you value the ancient and refined humanity of Greece than the barbarous pride of Hunnish and Norwegian grandeur.
From those ages whose cultivated wisdom and literature have kept us from still being Goths and Jutlanders, I could name the man who, from his private house, wrote a discourse to the Parliament of Athens persuading its members to change the form of democracy then established. In those days, so much honor was paid to those who professed the study of wisdom and eloquence, not only in their own country but in other lands, that cities and governing councils heard them gladly and with great respect whenever they had public advice for the state. Thus Dio of Prusa, a foreigner and private orator, advised the Rhodians against an earlier edict. I have many other similar examples, but it would be unnecessary to set them down here.
Yet if so much must be deducted from the value of a life wholly devoted to study, and from natural abilities that are perhaps not the worst produced at fifty-two degrees north latitude, that I cannot be counted equal to any of those who enjoyed this privilege, I would ask to be considered not so inferior to them as you yourselves are superior to most of those who received their counsel.
And how far you excel them, Lords and Commons, can be shown by no greater testimony than this: your prudent spirit recognizes and obeys the voice of reason, from whatever quarter it is heard speaking, and makes you as willing to repeal an act issued by yourselves as one issued by your predecessors.
If this is your resolution, as it would be an injury to think it is not, I do not know what should prevent me from presenting you with a fitting occasion to demonstrate both the love of truth you so eminently profess and the uprightness of judgment that does not ordinarily show partiality toward yourselves. You may do so by reconsidering the order you have enacted to regulate printing:
“That no Book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth Printed, unlesse the same be first approv’d and licenc’t by such, or at least one of such as shall be thereto appointed.”
I do not dispute the portion that justly preserves every person’s rights in his own works or provides for the poor. I only wish that these provisions may not become pretexts for abusing and persecuting honest, hardworking people who violate neither of them.
But I will now address the other clause, the licensing of books. We had thought that practice died together with its brothers, the Lenten and matrimonial licenses, when the prelates fell. I will give this clause such a homily as will show you, first, that its inventors are people you will be unwilling to acknowledge as your own; next, what should generally be thought about reading books of every kind; and then that this order does nothing to suppress the scandalous, seditious, and libelous books whose suppression was chiefly intended. Finally, I will show that it will principally discourage all learning and obstruct truth, not only by depriving our existing abilities of exercise and making them dull, but by hindering and cutting short discoveries that might yet be made in both religious and civil wisdom.
I do not deny that it is of the highest importance in both church and commonwealth to keep as vigilant a watch over how books conduct themselves as over how people do, and afterward to confine, imprison, and administer the sharpest justice to them as criminals. For books are not altogether dead things. They contain a power of life within them, as active as the soul whose offspring they are. Indeed, they preserve, as though in a vial, the purest strength and essence of the living intellect that produced them.
I know that books are as alive and as vigorously productive as the dragon’s teeth of the fable. When scattered and sown, they may happen to spring up as armed men. Yet, on the other hand, unless we act cautiously, it is almost as grave a thing to kill a good book as to kill a person. Whoever kills a person kills a rational creature, the image of God; but whoever destroys a good book kills reason itself, as though dealing the image of God a fatal blow in the eye.
Many people live as burdens upon the earth, but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up for the purpose of living a life beyond life. It is true that no age can restore a life, though perhaps its loss is not very great. Yet even the revolutions of many ages do not often recover a rejected truth, for lack of which whole nations suffer.
We should therefore be careful about the persecution we raise against the living labors of public figures, and about spilling that mature human life preserved and stored in books. We can see that a kind of homicide may be committed in this way, sometimes even a martyrdom. If it extends to the whole edition, it becomes a kind of massacre whose execution does not end with the destruction of elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, and kills an immortality rather than a life.
But lest I be condemned for introducing license while opposing licensing, I will undertake as much historical discussion as is needed to show what ancient and famous commonwealths did against this disorder. I will carry the account down to the time when this scheme of licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was seized upon by our prelates, and has now caught some of our presbyters.
In Athens, where books and intellects were always busier than in any other part of Greece, I find only two kinds of writing that the magistrates cared to notice: writings that were blasphemous and atheistic, and writings that were libelous. Thus the judges of the Areopagus ordered the books of Protagoras to be burned and banished him from their territory for a discourse that began with his confession that he did not know “whether there were gods, or whether not.”
Against defamation, they decreed that no one should be attacked by name, as had been the practice of Old Comedy. From this we may judge how they censured libel. This action was swift enough, as Cicero writes, to restrain both the desperate wit of other atheists and the open practice of defamation, as the outcome showed.
They paid no attention to other sects and opinions, even those tending toward sensual indulgence and the denial of divine providence. We therefore do not read that Epicurus, the libertine school of Cyrene, or anything uttered by Cynic shamelessness was ever called into question by the laws.
Nor is it recorded that the writings of the old comic poets were suppressed, though performances of their plays were forbidden. It is commonly known that Plato recommended to his royal pupil Dionysius the reading of Aristophanes, the most licentious of them all. Plato may be excused if holy Chrysostom, as is reported, studied the same author so much each night and possessed the art of distilling a scurrilous vehemence into the concentrated force of a stirring sermon.
Consider also Sparta, that other leading city of Greece. Lycurgus, its lawgiver, was so devoted to elegant learning that he was the first to bring the scattered works of Homer from Ionia. He also brought the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and soften Spartan harshness with his smooth songs and odes, so that law and civility might more easily be planted among them. It is therefore surprising how little the Spartans cared for the Muses and for books, caring for nothing but the feats of war.
No licensing of books was needed among them because they disliked every kind except their own laconic sayings. They seized on a slight occasion to drive Archilochus from their city, perhaps because he composed in a loftier style than their own soldierly ballads and roundelays could attain. Or, if he was expelled for his indecent verses, the Spartans were not equally cautious in their own conduct, for they were dissolute in their unrestrained mingling with one another. Euripides therefore declares in Andromache that all their women were unchaste. This much may show us how books were prohibited among the Greeks.
For many ages the Romans were also trained only in military roughness and closely resembled the Spartan manner. They knew little learning beyond what their Twelve Tables and the College of Pontiffs, together with their augurs and flamens, taught them in religion and law.
They were so unfamiliar with other learning that when Carneades and Critolaus, together with the Stoic Diogenes, came to Rome as ambassadors and used the occasion to give the city a taste of their philosophy, they were suspected of being seducers by no less a man than Cato the Censor. He proposed in the Senate that they be dismissed quickly and that all such Attic babblers be banished from Italy.
But Scipio and others among the noblest senators opposed Cato and his old Sabine austerity. They honored and admired the men, and at last, in his old age, the Censor himself began to study the learning about which he had previously been so scrupulous.
At that same time, however, Naevius and Plautus, the first Latin comic poets, had filled the city with all the borrowed scenes of Menander and Philemon. The Romans then began to consider what should be done about libelous books and authors. Naevius was soon imprisoned for his unrestrained pen and was released by the tribunes after he recanted. We also read that libels were burned and their authors punished by Augustus. No doubt similar severity was used if anything impious was written against the gods they revered.
Except in these two areas, the magistrates kept no account of what happened in books. Lucretius therefore set his Epicurean philosophy into verse for Memmius without being impeached, and had the honor of having his work published a second time by Cicero, so great a father of the commonwealth, although Cicero himself disputed that philosophy in his own writings.
Nor was the satirical sharpness or naked plainness of Lucilius, Catullus, or Horace prohibited by any order. In affairs of state, although Livy’s history praised the faction supported by Pompey, it was not suppressed on that account by Octavian Caesar, who belonged to the opposing faction. Caesar banished Ovid when the poet was old, supposedly for the wanton poems of his youth, but this was merely a political cover for some secret cause. Besides, his books were neither banished nor recalled.
From this point onward, we will encounter little in the Roman Empire except tyranny, so we should not be surprised that good books were silenced more often than bad ones. I therefore consider that I have said enough about what writings were punishable among the ancients. Apart from those exceptions, every other subject was open to discussion.
By this time the emperors had become Christians, and I do not find their discipline in this matter more severe than the earlier practice. The books of those they regarded as major heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned by the general councils. Only then were they prohibited or burned by the emperor’s authority.
As for the writings of pagan authors, unless they were open attacks upon Christianity, like those of Porphyry and Proclus, they encountered no prohibition that can be cited until about the year 400. At a council in Carthage, bishops themselves were forbidden to read pagan books, though they were permitted to read heresies. Long before them, others had taken the opposite view and felt greater scruples about the books of heretics than about those of pagans.
Father Paolo, the great unmasker of the Council of Trent, has already observed that the early councils and bishops ordinarily went no further than declaring which books were not commendable, leaving each person’s conscience free to read them or set them aside, until after the year 800.
After that time, the popes of Rome gathered whatever political authority they pleased into their own hands. Having already extended their dominion over human judgment, they extended it over human sight as well, burning and prohibiting whatever they disliked. Yet they remained sparing in their censures, and the books they treated in this way were not numerous, until Martin V issued his bull. He not only prohibited heretical books but became the first to excommunicate people for reading them. For at about that time, Wycliffe and Hus had become so formidable that they were the first to drive the papal court toward a stricter policy of prohibition.
Leo X and his successors followed this course until the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition mated to produce or perfect those catalogs and expurgatory indexes that rake through the entrails of many a good old author, violating him more terribly than anyone could violate his tomb.
They did not stop at heretical matters. If any subject did not suit their taste, they either condemned it by prohibition or sent it straight into the new purgatory of an index. To complete their encroachment, their latest invention was to decree that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed, as though Saint Peter, from Paradise, had bequeathed them the keys of the printing press as well, unless it had been approved and licensed under the signatures of two or three gluttonous friars. For example:
“Let the Chancellor Cini be pleas’d to see if in this present work be contain’d ought that may withstand the Printing.
“Vincent Rabatta, Vicar of Florence.”
“I have seen this present work, and finde nothing athwart the Catholick faith and good manners: In witnesse whereof I have given, etc.
“Nicolò Cini, Chancellor of Florence.”
“Attending the precedent relation, it is allow’d that this present work of Davanzati may be Printed.
“Vincent Rabatta, etc.”
“It may be Printed, July 15.
“Friar Simon Mompei d’Amelia, Chancellor of the holy office in Florence.”
Surely they imagine that, if the one from the bottomless pit had not long ago broken out of prison, this fourfold exorcism would keep him confined. I fear their next design will be to take custody of licensing the very thing Claudius intended to permit but never carried through: passing wind at a banquet, as Suetonius reports.
Now be pleased to look at another of their forms, bearing the Roman stamp:
“Permission to print, if it seems good to the reverend Master of the Holy Palace.
“Belcastro, Vicegerent.”
“Permission to print.
“Friar Nicolò Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.”
Sometimes five permissions to print appear together in dialogue on the public square of a single title page, complimenting one another and bowing with their shaven reverences as they decide whether the author, standing perplexed at the foot of his epistle, should go to the press or to the sponge.
These are the pretty responses, the precious antiphons, whose splendid echo so bewitched our prelates and their chaplains in recent times. They infatuated us with the gaudy imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House and another from the west end of Saint Paul’s. They aped Rome so closely that the word of command was always written in Latin, as though the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would shed no ink without Latin. Perhaps they thought no common language was worthy to express the pure conception of an Imprimatur.
But rather, as I hope, our English language, the language of a people always renowned and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find enough servile letters to spell such dictatorial presumption in English.
You have now seen the inventors and origin of book licensing exposed and traced as directly as any pedigree. As far as can be discovered, we did not receive it from any ancient state, government, or church; from any statute left by our ancestors, whether earlier or later; or from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad. It came instead from the most antichristian council and the most tyrannical Inquisition that ever conducted an inquiry.
Until then, books had always been admitted into the world as freely as any other birth. The offspring of the brain was no more stifled than the offspring of the womb. No envious Juno sat cross-legged over the birth of anyone’s intellectual offspring. If it proved a monster, who denies that it could justly be burned or sunk in the sea?
But it had never before been heard that a book, placed in a worse condition than a sinful soul, should stand before a jury before being born into the world, and should undergo in darkness the judgment of Rhadamanthus and his colleagues before it could cross the ferry backward into the light. This began only when that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled by the first entrance of the Reformation, sought out new limbos and new hells in which it might include our books among the number of the damned.
This was the rare delicacy so officiously seized and so badly imitated by our bishops, ravenous for inquisitorial power, and by the lesser friars who attended them as chaplains. That you now dislike these indisputable originators of the licensing order, and that every sinister intention was far from your thoughts when you were pressed to enact it, will readily be affirmed by all who know the integrity of your actions and the honor you give to truth.
But some will say, “Even if its inventors were bad, might not the thing itself still be good?” It might. Yet if the thing is no profound invention, but something obvious and easy for anyone to discover, and if the best and wisest commonwealths throughout all ages and circumstances have refrained from using it, while the most deceitful seducers and oppressors of humanity were the first to adopt it, for no other purpose than to obstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation, then I am among those who believe that extracting any good use from such an invention would require a more difficult alchemy than Llull ever knew. For now, I ask only that this argument persuade us to regard licensing as a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as it surely deserves to be regarded because of the tree that bore it, until I can examine its properties one by one. But first I must finish what I proposed to consider: what we should think in general about reading books of every kind, and whether more benefit or harm proceeds from it.
I need not dwell on the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, something hardly possible without reading their books of every kind. This is especially true of Paul, who thought it no defilement to insert into Holy Scripture sayings from three Greek poets, one of them a tragedian. Nevertheless, the question was sometimes disputed among the early Doctors of the Church, though the great weight of opinion affirmed that such reading was both lawful and profitable. This became plainly evident when Julian the Apostate, the most subtle enemy of our faith, issued a decree forbidding Christians to study pagan learning. His reason was: “They wound us with our own weapons, and with our owne arts and sciences they overcome us.”
Indeed, the Christians were driven to such desperate measures by this crafty policy, and were in such danger of sinking into complete ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were compelled, so to speak, to mint all seven liberal arts out of the Bible. They recast it into various forms of speeches, poems, and dialogues, even devising a new Christian grammar. But the historian Socrates says, “The providence of God provided better then the industry of Apollinarius and his Son, by taking away that illiterat law with the life of him who devis’d it.” They regarded deprivation of Greek learning as so great an injury, and as a persecution that undermined and secretly weakened the Church more than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian.
Perhaps it was with the same political design that the Devil whipped Saint Jerome in a Lenten dream for reading Cicero, unless the vision was merely a phantom produced by the fever that had seized him. If an angel had disciplined him, unless it was for dwelling too much on Ciceronian style, and had chastised the reading rather than the vanity, the punishment would have been plainly partial. First, it would have corrected him for reading the grave Cicero but not the scurrilous Plautus, whom he admits he had read not long before. Next, it would have corrected him alone while allowing so many more ancient Fathers to grow old in those pleasant and flourishing studies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition. Basil even teaches how some good use may be made of the _Margites_, a playful poem written by Homer that is no longer extant; and why, then, not of _Morgante_, an Italian romance written for much the same purpose?
But if we agree that visions are to judge us, Eusebius records a vision far older than Jerome’s tale to the nun Eustochium, and one with no fever in it. About the year 240, Dionysius of Alexandria was a man of great reputation in the Church for piety and learning. He had often strengthened his arguments against heretics by becoming familiar with their books, until a certain presbyter troubled his conscience by asking how he dared venture among such defiling volumes. The worthy man, unwilling to give offense, began to reconsider the question. Then a vision suddenly sent from God, as his own letter affirms, confirmed him with these words: “Read any books what ever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter.”
He accepted this revelation all the more readily, as he confesses, because it agreed with the Apostle’s words to the Thessalonians: “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” He might also have added another notable saying by the same author: “To the pure all things are pure.” This applies not only to food and drink, but to every kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil. Knowledge cannot defile, and consequently neither can books, unless the will and conscience are defiled.
Books are like food and provisions: some have a good substance and some an evil one. Yet in that indisputably canonical vision God said without exception, “Rise Peter, kill and eat,” leaving the choice to each person’s discretion. Wholesome food differs little or not at all from unwholesome food when received by a corrupted stomach, and the best books can be applied to evil purposes by a wicked mind. Bad food will scarcely produce good nourishment even in the healthiest digestion. Bad books differ in this respect, however: to a discerning and judicious reader they can serve in many ways to expose, refute, forewarn, and illustrate.
What better witness could you expect me to produce than one of your own members now sitting in Parliament, Mr. Selden, reputed the foremost among this country’s learned men? His volume on natural and national laws proves, not only through the great authorities it brings together but through subtle arguments and propositions that are almost mathematical demonstrations, that all opinions, even errors, when known, read, and compared, provide essential service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is most true.
I therefore understand that when God enlarged the universal diet of the human body, always preserving the rules of temperance, he also left the diet and refreshment of our minds to individual judgment, as he had done before, so that every mature person might exercise the capacity to guide himself. How great a virtue temperance is, and how important throughout a person’s whole life! Yet God entrusts the management of so great a responsibility, without a particular law or prescription, entirely to the conduct of every adult.
When God himself fed the Jews from heaven, the omer that formed each person’s daily portion of manna is calculated to have contained more than enough to satisfy the heartiest eater for three meals. Actions that enter into a person, rather than issue from him, and therefore do not defile him, are not usually held by God under a perpetual childhood of prescription. Instead, God entrusts him with the gift of reason so that he may choose for himself. There would be little work left for preaching if law and compulsion should grow so quickly over matters formerly governed only by exhortation.
Solomon informs us that much reading is weariness to the flesh, but neither he nor any other inspired author tells us that this or that kind of reading is unlawful. Surely, if God had thought it good to limit us in this matter, it would have been far more useful to tell us what was unlawful than what was wearisome.
As for the burning of the Ephesian books by Saint Paul’s converts, the reply is that the books were magical, as the Syriac renders the word. It was a private and voluntary act, leaving us free to imitate it voluntarily. In remorse, the men burned books that belonged to them. The magistrate is not appointed to do so by this example. These men had practiced what the books taught; another person might perhaps have read them with some benefit.
Good and evil, as we know, grow together in the field of this world almost inseparably. The knowledge of good is so entangled and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and the two are so difficult to distinguish because of their many cunning resemblances, that even the confused seeds imposed on Psyche as an unending labor to separate and sort were not more thoroughly mixed. From the rind of a single tasted apple, the knowledge of good and evil sprang into the world like twins clinging together. Perhaps this is the doom into which Adam fell when he came to know good and evil, meaning that he came to know good through evil.
Given humanity’s present condition, what wisdom can there be in choosing, or what self-restraint in abstaining, without knowledge of evil? The person who can perceive and consider vice with all its bait and seeming pleasures, yet abstain, distinguish, and prefer what is truly better, is the true Christian warrior. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, never exercised or trained, which never ventures out to see its adversary but slips away from the race in which the immortal garland must be won, not without dust and heat.
Certainly, we do not bring innocence into the world. We bring impurity instead. What purifies us is trial, and trial comes through what is contrary to us. A virtue that is still a novice in contemplating evil, that does not know the utmost that vice promises its followers but rejects it nonetheless, is an untested virtue, not a pure one. Its whiteness is merely the whiteness of an external coating.
For this reason our wise and serious poet Spenser, whom I am willing to be known as considering a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, portrays true temperance in the person of Guyon. He leads Guyon, accompanied by his Palmer, through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss so that he may see and know, yet abstain.
Since knowledge and observation of vice are so necessary in this world to the formation of human virtue, and the examination of error is so necessary to the confirmation of truth, how can we scout more safely and with less danger through the regions of sin and falsehood than by reading every kind of treatise and hearing every kind of argument? This is the benefit that may be gained from reading books indiscriminately.
But three kinds of harm are commonly said to result from such reading. First, people fear that infection may spread. If so, all human learning and every controversy about religion must be removed from the world, including the Bible itself. The Bible often reports blasphemy without delicacy. It describes the sensual thoughts of wicked people with considerable eloquence. It presents the holiest people passionately murmuring against providence with all the arguments of Epicurus. In other great disputes, it gives answers that appear uncertain and obscure to the ordinary reader.
Ask a Talmudist why the marginal words to be read aloud, the _Keri_, are so concerned with modesty that Moses and all the Prophets cannot persuade him to pronounce the written words, the _Chetiv_. For these reasons, as we all know, the Papists themselves placed the Bible in the first rank of prohibited books.
The most ancient Fathers must next be removed, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius’s book of _Evangelical Preparation_, which conducts our ears through a hoard of pagan obscenities before bringing us to the Gospel. Who does not find that Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others disclose more heresies than they successfully refute, and that they often condemn as heresy what is actually the truer opinion?
It is no answer to say that these writings, and all the supposedly most infectious pagan authors with whom the life of human learning is bound up, were written in unknown languages. We can be sure that the worst people know those languages very well. They are both the most capable and the most diligent in instilling into others the poison they have drawn from them, first carrying it into the courts of princes and acquainting rulers with the choicest pleasures and refinements of sin. Perhaps Petronius did this, whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his revels, as did that notorious obscene writer of Arezzo, feared and yet cherished by Italian courtiers. For posterity’s sake, I will not name the man whom Henry VIII jokingly called his Vicar of Hell.
By this shorter route, all the contagion foreign books can pour out will find a passage to the people far easier and shorter than a voyage to India, whether sailed eastward by the north of Cathay or westward by the north of Canada, however severely our Spanish-style licensing may gag the English press.
On the other hand, infection from books of religious controversy is more uncertain and dangerous to the learned than to the ignorant, yet those books must be permitted to pass untouched by the licenser. It would be difficult to give an example of an ignorant person ever seduced by a papist book in English unless someone from that clergy recommended and explained it to him. Indeed, all such treatises, whether false or true, are to such a reader as Isaiah’s prophecy was to the eunuch: not understandable without a guide.
