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AREOPAGITICA
(1644) - Selections
AREOPAGITICA A SPEECH FOR THE
LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND
This is true liberty, when free-born men, Having to advise the public,
may speak free, Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise; Who
neither can, nor will, may hold his peace: What can be juster in a state
than this?
It is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have
a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter
to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors.
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of
life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are;
nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction
of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and
as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being
sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other
hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good
book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he
who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God,
as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good
book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured
up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life,
whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not
oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole
nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we
raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned
life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend
to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends
not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal
and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather
than a life...
Dionysius Alexandrinus was about the year 240 a person of great name in
the Church for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much
against heretics by being conversant in their books; until a certain presbyter
laid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himself among
those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into
a new debate with himself what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision
sent from God (it is his own epistle that so avers it) confirmed him in
these words: READ ANY BOOKS WHATEVER COME TO THY HANDS, FOR THOU ART SUFFICIENT
BOTH TO JUDGE ARIGHT AND TO EXAMINE EACH MATTER. To this revelation he
assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was answerable to that
of the Apostle to the Thessalonians, PROVE ALL THINGS, HOLD FAST THAT
WHICH IS GOOD. And he might have added another remarkable saying of the
same author: TO THE PURE, ALL THINGS ARE PURE; not only meats and drinks,
but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot
defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not
defiled. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of
evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said without
exception, RISE, PETER, KILL AND EAT, leaving the choice to each man's
discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing
from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable
to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in
the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books,
that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to
discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate...
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with
the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be
discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as
an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good
and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.
And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and
evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of
man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear
without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice
with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish,
and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race,
where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much
rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary...
Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary
to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the
confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout
into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates
and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be
had of books promiscuously read...
If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must
regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No
music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric.
There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment
be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest;
for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty
licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every
house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed
what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that
whisper softness in chambers?..
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...
[Licensing is] 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?..
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties...
And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speak what may
help to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The temple of
Janus with his two controversial faces might now not unsignificantly be
set open. And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play
upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing
and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple;
who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her
confuting is the best and surest suppressing. He who hears what praying
there is for light and clearer knowledge to be sent down among us, would
think of other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of Geneva,
framed and fabricked 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 labouring the hardest labour in the
deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their
equipage: drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged: scattered
and defeated all objections in his way; calls out his adversary into the
plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that
he may try the matter by dint of argument: for his opponents then to skulk,
to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger
should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness
and cowardice in the wars of Truth. For who knows not that Truth is strong,
next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings
to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error
uses against her power...
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 of petty schisms. Not that I can think well of every light
separation, or that all in a Church is to be expected gold and silver
and precious stones: it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from
the tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the Angels'
ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of one mind--as
who looks 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 extirpate, provided
first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain
the weak and the 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 neighbouring 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.
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