[Areopagitica : 2|back.
If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were
to be under
pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were
virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing,
what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be that
complain of
divine Providence for suffering
Adam to transgress;
foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him
freedom to
choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere
artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We
ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is
of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking
object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein
the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore
did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but
that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?
They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to
remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is
a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though
some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it
cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when
this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a
covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannot
bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut
up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in
any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not hither so;
such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of
this point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how
much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the
matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them
both alike.
This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command
us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even
to a profuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can
wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a
rigour contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or
scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the
trial of virtue and the exercise of truth? It would be better
done, to learn that the law must needs be frivolous, which goes to
restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to
evil. And were I the chooser, a dream of well-doing should be
preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-
doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one
virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.
And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking,
travelling, or conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is of
the same effect that writings are, yet grant the thing to be
prohibited were only books, it appears that this Order hitherto is
far insufficient to the end which it intends. Do we not see, not
once or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against the
Parliament and City, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, and
dispersed among us, for all that licensing can do? Yet this is the
prime service a man would think, wherein this Order should give
proof of itself. If it were executed, you'll say. But certain, if
execution be remiss or blindfold now, and in this particular, what
will it be hereafter and in other books? If then the Order shall
not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords and Commons,
ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed books
already printed and divulged; after ye have drawn them up into a
list, that all may know which are condemned, and which not; and
ordain that no foreign books be delivered out of custody, till they
have been read over. This office will require the whole time of
not a few overseers, and those no vulgar men. There be also books
which are partly useful and excellent, partly culpable and
pernicious; this work will ask as many more officials, to make
expurgations and expunctions, that the commonwealth of learning be
not damnified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upon
their hands, ye must be fain to catalogue all those printers who
are found frequently offending, and forbid the importation of their
whole suspected typography. In a word, that this your Order may be
exact and not deficient, ye must reform it perfectly according to
the model of Trent and Seville, which I know ye abhor to do.
Yet though ye should condescend to this, which God forbid, the
Order still would be but fruitless and defective to that end
whereto ye meant it. If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so
unread or so uncatechized in story, that hath not heard of many
sects refusing books as a hindrance, and preserving their doctrine
unmixed for many ages, only by unwritten traditions? The Christian
faith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown to have spread
all over Asia, ere any Gospel or Epistle was seen in writing. If
the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain,
whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, the
wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hath
been executed upon books.
Another reason, whereby to make it plain that this Order will
miss the end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be in
every licenser. It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge
to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted
into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common
measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else
no mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not; which
is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behooves him,
there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a
greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the
perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge
volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain
seasons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and
in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any
time in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believe
how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a
sensible nostril, should be able to endure. In this one thing I
crave leave of the present licensers to be pardoned for so
thinking; who doubtless took this office up, looking on it through
their obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all
things seem easy and unlaborious to them; but that this short trial
hath wearied them out already, their own expressions and excuses to
them who make so many journeys to solicit their licence are
testimony enough. Seeing therefore those who now possess the
employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it; and
that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own
hours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put
himself to the salary of a press corrector; we may easily foresee
what kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant,
imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary. This is what I had to
show, wherein this Order cannot conduce to that end whereof it
bears the intention.
I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt
it causes, in being first the greatest discouragement and affront
that can be offered to learning, and to learned men.
It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon every
least breath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute more
equally Church revenues, that then all learning would be for ever
dashed and discouraged. But as for that opinion, I never found
cause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell with
the clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy
speech of any churchman who had a competency left him. If
therefore ye be 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 judgment and the honesty of one
who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended,
as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and
examiner, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption,
is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing
spirit that can be put upon him.
What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at
school, if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue
of an Imprimatur; if serious and elaborate writings, as if they
were no more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue,
must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and
extemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted with his own
actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the
hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself
reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a
fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up
all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches,
meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his
judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be
informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him.
If, in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness,
no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring
him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and
suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his
midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view
of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps his
inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of
bookwriting, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear in
print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the
back of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or
seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author,
to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning.
And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy, as to
have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after
licensing, while the book is yet under the press, which not seldom
happens to the best and diligentest writers; and that perhaps a
dozen times in one book? The printer dares not go beyond his
licensed copy; so often then must the author trudge to his leave-
giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a
jaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man,
can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the
press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author
lose his accuratest thoughts, and send the book forth worse than he
had made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy
and vexation that can befall.
And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of
teaching; how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or
else had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers,
is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal
licenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the
hidebound humour which he calls his judgment? When every acute
reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be ready
with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him:
I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me
under the wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the
licenser, but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who
shall warrant me his judgment? The State, sir, replies the
stationer, but has a quick return: The State shall be my governors,
but not my critics; they may be mistaken in the choice of a
licenser, as easily as this licenser may be mistaken in an author;
this is some common stuff; and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon,
THAT SUCH AUTHORIZED BOOKS ARE BUT THE LANGUAGE OF THE TIMES.
For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more than
ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession,
yet his very office and his commission enjoins him to let pass
nothing but what is vulgarly received already.
Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceased
author, though never so famous in his lifetime and even to this
day, come to their hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted,
if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge,
uttered in the height of zeal (and who knows whether it might not
be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet not suiting with every low
decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the
reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him
their dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be
lost, for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a
perfunctory licenser. And to what an author this violence hath
been lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to be
faithfully published, I could now instance, but shall forbear till
a more convenient season.
Yet if these things be not resented seriously and timely by them
who have the remedy in their power, but that such iron-moulds as
these shall have authority to gnaw out the choicest periods of
exquisitest books, and to commit such a treacherous fraud against
the orphan remainders of worthiest men after death, the more sorrow
will belong to that hapless race of men, whose misfortune it is to
have understanding. Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care
to be more than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to be
ignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the
only pleasant life, and only in request.
And it is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive,
and most injurious to the written labours and monuments of the
dead, so to me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole
nation. I cannot set so light by all the invention, the art, the
wit, the grave and solid judgment which is in England, as that it
can be comprehended in any twenty capacities how good soever, much
less that it should not pass except their superintendence be over
it, except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that it
should be uncurrent without their manual stamp. Truth and
understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in
by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make
a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and
licence it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks. What is it but
a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed
the sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair
from all quarters to twenty licensing forges? Had anyone written
and divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest life,
misusing and forfeiting the esteem had of his reason among men, if
after conviction this only censure were adjudged him that he should
never henceforth write but what were first examined by an appointed
officer, whose hand should be annexed to pass his credit for him
that now he might be safely read; it could not be apprehended less
than a disgraceful punishment. Whence to include the whole nation,
and those that never yet thus offended, under such a diffident and
suspectful prohibition, may plainly be understood what a
disparagement it is. So much the more, whenas debtors and
delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unoffensive books
must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title.
Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we be
so jealous over them, as that we dare not trust them with an
English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vicious,
and ungrounded people; in such a sick and weak state of faith and
discretion, as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe
of a licenser? That this is care or love of them, we cannot
pretend, whenas, in those popish places where the laity are most
hated and despised, the same strictness is used over them. Wisdom
we cannot call it, because it stops but one breach of licence, nor
that neither: whenas those corruptions, which it seeks to prevent,
break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut.
And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our ministers
also, of whose labours we should hope better, and of the
proficiency which their flock reaps by them, than that after all
this light of the Gospel which is, and is to be, and all this
continual preaching, they should still be frequented with such an
unprincipled, unedified and laic rabble, as that the whiff of every
new pamphlet should stagger them out of their catechism and
Christian walking. This may have much reason to discourage the
ministers when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations,
and the benefiting of their hearers, as that they are not thought
fit to be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser;
that all the sermons, all the lectures preached, printed, vented in
such numbers, and such volumes, as have now well nigh made all
other books unsaleable, should not be armour enough against one
single Enchiridion, without the castle of St. Angelo of an
Imprimatur.
And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these
arguments of learned men's discouragement at this your Order are
mere flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen and
heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition
tyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for that
honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of
philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves
did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning
amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the
glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now
these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I
found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the
Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the
Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that
England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke,
nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other
nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my
hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should
be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten
by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. When
that was once begun, it was as little in my fear that what words of
complaint I heard among learned men of other parts uttered against
the Inquisition, the same I should hear by as learned men at home,
uttered in time of Parliament against an order of licensing; and
that so generally that, when I had disclosed myself a companion of
their discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom an
honest quaestorship had endeared to the Sicilians was not more by
them importuned against Verres, than the favourable opinion which
I had among many who honour ye, and are known and respected by ye,
loaded me with entreaties and persuasions, that I would not despair
to lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind,
toward the removal of an undeserved thraldom upon learning. That
this is not therefore the disburdening of a particular fancy, but
the common grievance of all those who had prepared their minds and
studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, and from
others to entertain it, thus much may satisfy.
And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what
the general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again and
licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so
suspicious of all men, as to fear each book and the shaking of
every leaf, before we know what the contents are; if some who but
of late were little better than silenced from preaching shall come
now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot
be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over
learning: and will soon put it out of controversy, that bishops and
presbyters are the same to us, both name and thing. That those
evils of prelaty, which before from five or six and twenty sees
were distributively charged upon the whole people, will now light
wholly upon learning, is not obscure to us: whenas now the pastor
of a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be exalted
archbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, but
keep his other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of late
cried down the sole ordination of every novice Bachelor of Art, and
denied sole jurisdiction over the simplest parishioner, shall now
at home in his private chair assume both these over worthiest and
excellentest books and ablest authors that write them.
This is not, ye Covenants and Protestations that we have made!
this is not to put down prelaty; this is but to chop an episcopacy;
this is but to translate the Palace Metropolitan from one kind of
dominion into another; this is but an old canonical sleight of
commuting our penance. To startle thus betimes at a mere
unlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of every
conventicle, and a while after will make a conventicle of every
Christian meeting. But I am certain that a State governed by the
rules of justice and fortitude, or a Church built and founded upon
the rock of faith and true knowledge, cannot be so pusillanimous.
While things are yet not constituted in religion, that freedom of
writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the
prelates and learnt by them from the Inquisition, to shut us up all
again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubt
and discouragement to all learned and religious men.
Who cannot but discern the fineness of this politic drift, and
who are the contrivers; that while bishops were to be baited down,
then all presses might be open; it was the people's birthright and
privilege in time of Parliament, it was the breaking forth of
light. But now, the bishops abrogated and voided out of the
Church, as if our Reformation sought no more but to make room for
others into their seats under another name, the episcopal arts
begin to bud again, the cruse of truth must run no more oil,
liberty of printing must be enthralled again under a prelatical
commission of twenty, the privilege of the people nullified, and,
which is worse, the freedom of learning must groan again, and to
her old fetters: all this the Parliament yet sitting. Although
their own late arguments and defences against the prelates might
remember them, that this obstructing violence meets for the most
part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at:
instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and
invests them with a reputation. The punishing of wits enhances
their authority, saith the Viscount St. Albans; and a forbidden
writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in
the faces of them who seek to tread it out. This Order,
therefore, may prove a nursing-mother to sects, but I shall easily
show how it will be a step-dame to Truth: and first by disenabling
us to the maintenance of what is known already.
Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge
thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs 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 gladlier post off to
another than the charge and care of their religion. There be--who
knows not that there be?--of Protestants and professors who live
and die in as arrant an implicit faith as any lay Papist of
Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his
profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so
many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to
keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? fain he
would have the name to be religious, fain he would bear up with his
neighbours in that. What does he therefore, but 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 dividual movable, and goes and comes near him, according
as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him
gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night,
prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises,
is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced brewage, and
better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly
fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks
abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop
trading all day without his religion.
Part Four