Liberty. He venerates the spirits of books; "for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as the soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do préserve 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."

He appeals to antiquity: he shows that none of the worthy and ancient Republics of Greece or Italy ever prohibited any but immoral, defamatory, or Atheistical publications. He enters into the history of this prohibiting and licensing. Martin V., the Pope of Rome, so named, was the first that prohibited by special Bull, for about that time Wickliffe

Then the

and Huss were growing terrible. Spanish Inquisition and the Council of Trent, engendering together, brought forth or perfected those catalogues and Expurging Indexes, that rake through the entrails of many a good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.

"And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but from the most anti-Christian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it

can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of reformation, sought out new limboes and new hells, wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their chaplains."

Thus in the first place, disposing of the history of these intellectual prohibitions, by fastening the origin opprobriously upon those who did not stop with questionable writings, but in a Carthagenian Council, laid under their ban and curse all the productions of the heathen world of genius and science, and ridiculing that inquisitorial folly," as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press, as well as of Paradise, and committed the approving and licensing of books into the hands of two or three gluttonous friars." He laughs at the tale told us by St. Jerome, of the devil whipping him for reading Cicero. Strange "to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies, without the lash of such a tutoring apparition.

“But if it be agreed we shall be tried by

visions, there is a vision recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerome, to the nun Eustochium, and besides, has nothing of a fever in it. 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.'

6

"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 kinds of knowledge, whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience

be not defiled. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a haughty mind are not unapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarcely breed good nourishment in 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. Whereof what better witness can ye expect I should produce than one of your own now sitting in parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden; whose volume of natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainments of what is truest.'

And from hence follows a most beautiful and truthful discussion upon the nature of virtue, and its active or passive character, in order that the higher lessons of self-reliance may be taught, and that duty may not result from the mere observance of a prescribed and written law, or be the mere following of an unreasoning impulse. Good and evil now grow together in