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Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shall
be ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but
what passes through the custom-house of certain publicans that have
the tonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will
straight give themselves up into your hands, make 'em and cut 'em
out what religion ye please: there be delights, there be
recreations and
jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from
sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream.
What need they torture their heads with that which others have
taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own purveying?
These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our
knowledge 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 a staunch and
solid piece of
framework, as any January could freeze together.
Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergy
themselves. It is no new thing never heard of before, for a
parochial minister, who has his reward and is at his Hercules'
pillars in a warm benefice, to be easily inclinable, if he have
nothing else that may rouse up his studies, to finish his circuit
in an English Concordance and a topic folio, the gatherings and
savings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony and a Catena; treading
the constant round of certain common doctrinal heads, attended with
their uses, motives, marks, and means, out of which, as out of an
alphabet, or sol-fa, by forming and transforming, joining and
disjoining variously, a little bookcraft, and two hours'
meditation, might furnish him unspeakably to the performance of
more than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to reckon up the
infinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other
loitering gear. But as for the multitude of sermons ready printed
and piled up, on every text that is not difficult, our London
trading St. Thomas in his vestry, and add to boot St. Martin and
St. Hugh, have not within their hallowed limits more vendible ware
of all sorts ready made: so that penury he never need fear of
pulpit provision, having where so plenteously to refresh his
magazine. But 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 used, do not make us affect the laziness of a
licensing Church.
For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth
guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own
weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and
irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man
judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good
as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house
to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to
the world what his opinion is, what his reasons, and wherefore that
which is now thought cannot be sound? Christ urged it as wherewith
to justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing is more
public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be,
there being so many whose business and profession merely it is to
be the champions of truth; which if they neglect, what can be
imputed but their sloth, or unability?
Thus much we are hindered and disinured by this course of
licensing, toward the true knowledge of what we seem to know. For
how much it hurts and hinders the licensers themselves in the
calling of their ministry, more than any secular employment, if
they will discharge that office as they ought, so that of necessity
they must neglect either the one duty or the other, I insist not,
because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience,
how they will decide it there.
There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the
incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us
to; more than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens
and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our
richest merchandise, truth; nay, it was first established and put
in practice by Antichristian malice and mystery on set purpose to
extinguish, if it were possible, the light of Reformation, and to
settle falsehood; little differing from that policy wherewith the
Turk upholds his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing. 'Tis not
denied, but gladly confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to
Heaven louder than most of nations, for that great measure of truth
which we enjoy, especially in those main points between us and the
Pope, with his appurtenances the prelates: but he who thinks we are
to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of
reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show
us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion
declares that he is yet far short of truth.
Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and
was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended,
and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a
wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian
Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris,
took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand
pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever
since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating
the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris,
went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could
find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor
ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring
together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an
immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these
licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity,
forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue
to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.
We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself,
it smites us into darkness. Who can discern those planets that are
oft combust, and those stars of brightest magnitude that rise and
set with the sun, until the opposite motion of their orbs bring
them to such a place in the firmament, where they may be seen
evening or morning? The light which we have gained was given us,
not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more
remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest,
the unmitring of a bishop, and the removing him from off the
presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy nation. No, if
other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both
economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have
looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath
beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be who
perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a
calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own
pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will
hear 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
homogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in theology
as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a
Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and
inwardly divided minds.
Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof
ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and
dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to
invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of
any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore
the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so
ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and
ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of
Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old
philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius
Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural
wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is
it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out
yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond
the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to
learn our language and our theologic arts.
Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of
Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner
propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation
chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be
proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of
Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate
perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable
spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator,
perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name of
Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming
all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our
obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are
become hitherto the latest and 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 defence of
beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by
their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and
ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty,
the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What
could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to
seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and
pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing
people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon
more than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks;
had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be
much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men
is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of
sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after
knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city.
What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather
praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-
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
forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and
Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not,
if some great and worthy stranger should come among us, wise to
discern the mould and temper of a people, and how to govern it,
observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our
extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and
freedom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring the
Roman docility and courage: If such were my Epirots, I would not
despair the greatest design that could be attempted, to make a
Church or kingdom happy.
Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and
sectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some
cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there
should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there
must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in
the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every
stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a
continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can
every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the
perfection consists in this, that, out of many moderate varieties
and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional,
arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole
pile and structure.
Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in
spiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected. For
now the time seems come, wherein Moses the great prophet may sit in
heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his
fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord's
people, are become prophets. No marvel then though some men, and
some good men too perhaps, but young in goodness, as Joshua then
was, envy them. They fret, and out of their own weakness are in
agony, lest these divisions and subdivisions will undo us. The
adversary again applauds, and waits the hour: when they have
branched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties and
partitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm
root, out of which we all grow, though into branches: nor will
beware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through at
every angle of his ill-united and unwieldy brigade. And that we
are to hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, and
that we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps, though
over-timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in
the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have
these reasons to persuade me.
First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked
about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round,
defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her
walls and suburb trenches, that then the people, or the greater
part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of
highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be
disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a
rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of,
argues first a singular goodwill, contentedness and confidence in
your prudent foresight and safe government, Lords and Commons; and
from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-grounded
contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as
great spirits among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh besieged
by Hannibal, being in the 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 operations of
wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution
the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly
up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom
and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and
sublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens us
not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the
old and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax
young again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperous
virtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latter
ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her
invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty
youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam;
purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself
of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and
flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter
about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would
prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.
What would ye do then? should ye suppress all this flowery crop
of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in
this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers over
it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know
nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it,
Lords and Commons, they who counsel ye to such a suppressing do as
good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. If
it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing
and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own
mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and
Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased
us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that
which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence
of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and
lifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves.
Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly
pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made
us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We
can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found
us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be,
oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have
freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts
more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest
things, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannot
suppress that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law,
that fathers may dispatch at will their own children. And who
shall then stick closest to ye, and excite others? not he who takes
up arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of Danegelt.
Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet love
my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all
liberties.
What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful and
so unequal to suppress opinions for the newness or the
unsuitableness to a customary acceptance, will not be my task to
say. I only shall repeat what I have learned from one of your own
honourable number, a right noble and pious lord, who, had he not
sacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church and Commonwealth, we
had not now missed and bewailed a worthy and undoubted patron of
this argument. Ye know him, I am sure; yet I for honour's sake,
and may it be eternal to him, shall name him, the Lord Brook. He
writing of episcopacy, and by the way treating of sects and
schisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of his
dying charge, which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard
with ye, so full of meekness and breathing charity, that next to
his last testament, who bequeathed love and peace to his disciples,
I cannot call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild
and peaceful. He there exhorts us to hear with patience and
humility those, however they be miscalled, that desire to live
purely, in such a use of God's ordinances, as the best guidance of
their conscience gives them, and to tolerate them, though in some
disconformity to ourselves. The book itself will tell us more at
large, being published to the world, and dedicated to the
Parliament by him who, both for his life and for his death,
deserves that what advice he left be not laid by without perusal.
Part Five