firft entrance of reformation, fought out new Limboes and new Hells wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morfel fo officiously snatched up, and fo illfavouredly imitated by our inquifiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their chaplains. That ye like not now thefe most certain authors of this licenfing order, and that all finifter intention was far diftant from your thoughts, when ye were importuned the paffing it, all men who know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honour truth, will clear ye readily.

But fome will fay, what though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good. It may fo; yet if that thing be no fuch deep invention, but obvious and eafy for any man to light on, and yet beft and wifeft commonwealths through all ages and occafions have forborn to use it, and falfeft feducers and oppreffors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obftruct and hinder the first approach of reformation; I am of those who believe, it will be a harder alchymy than Lullius ever knew, to fublimate any good ufe out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I requeft to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and fufpicious fruit, as certainly it deferves, for the tree that bore it, until I can diffect one by one the properties it has. But I have firft to finish, as was propounded, what is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever fort they be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds.

Not to infift upon the examples of Mofes, Daniel, and Paul, who were skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, which could not probably be without reading their books of all forts, in Paul efpecially, who thought it no defilement to infert into holy fcripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them a tragedian; the question was notwithstanding fometimes controverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that fide which affirmed it both lawful and profitable, as was then evidently perceived, when Julian the Apoftate, and fubtleft enemy to our faith, made a decree forbidding Chriftians the ftudy of heathen learning;

learning; for faid he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the Chriftians were put fo to their shifts by this crafty means, and fo much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a man may fay, to coin all the feven liberal fciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new chriftian grammar. But, faith the hiftorian Socrates, the providence of God provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his fon, by taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a perfecution more undermining, and fecretly decaying the church, than the open cruelty of Decius or Dioclefian. And perhaps it was the fame politic drift that the devil whipped St. Jerom in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or elfe it was a phantasm, bred by the fever which had then feized him. For had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much on Ciceronianifms, and had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for fcurril Plautus, whom he confeffes to have been reading not long before; next to correct him only, and let fo many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid ftudies without the lath of fuch a tutoring apparition; infomuch that Bafil teaches how fome good ufe may be made of Margites a fportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer and why not then of Morgante an Italian romance much to the fame purpose ? But if it be agreed we shall be tried by vifions, there is a vifion recorded by Eufebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerom, to the nun Euftochium, and befides, has nothing of a fever in it. Dionyfius 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 converfant in their books; until a certain prefbyter laid it fcrupuloufly to his confcience, how he durft venture himself among thofe defiling volumes. The worthy man, loth to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself,

what

what was to be thought; when fuddenly a vifion sent from God, (it is his own epiftle that fo avers it,) confirmed him in thefe words: "Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art fufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter." To this revelation he affented the fooner, as he confeffes, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to the Theffalonians; "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." And he might have added another remarkable saying of the fame 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 confequently the books, if the will and confcience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are; fome of good, fome of evil fubftance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vifion faid without exception, "rife Peter kill and eat;" leaving the choice to each man's difcretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unapplicable to occafions of evil. Bad meats will fcarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a difcreet and judicious reader ferve in many respects to difcover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illuftrate. Whereof what better witness can ye expect I fhould produce, than one of your own now fitting in parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden; whofe volume of natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquifite reafons and theorems almoft mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errours, known, read, and collated, are of main fervice and affiftance toward the speedy attainment of what is trueft. I conceive therefore, that when God did enlarge the univerfal diet of man's body (faving ever the rules of temperance,) he then alfo, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repafting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own leading capacity. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing fo great a truft without particular law or prescription,

wholly

wholly to the demeanour of every grown man. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews from Heaven, that omer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to have been more than might have well fufficed the heartieft feeder thrice as many meals. For thofe actions which enter into a man, rather than iffue out of him, and therefore defile not, God ufes not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prefcription, but trufts him with the gift of reason to be his own choofer; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulfion fhould grow fo faft upon thofe things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us, that much reading is a wearinefs to the flesh; but neither he, nor other infpired author tells us that fuch or fuch reading is unlawful; yet certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much more expedient to have told us what was unlawful, than what was wearifome. As for the burning of thofe Ephesian books by St. Paul's converts; it is replied, the books were magic, the Syriac fo renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary imitation: the men in remorfe burnt those books which were their own; the magiftrate by this example is not appointed; these men practifed the books, another might perhaps have read them in fome fort usefully. Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost infeparably; and the knowledge of good is fo involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in fo many cunning refemblances hardly to be difcerned, that thofe confused feeds which were impofed upon Psyche as an inceffant labour to cull out, and fort 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 ot knowing good and evil, that is to fay 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 confider vice with all her baits and feeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer,

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 fallies out and fees her adverfary, but flinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Affuredly 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. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmoft that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whitenefs is but an excremental whitenefs; which was the reafon why our fage and ferious poet Spenfer, (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,) defcribing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly blifs, that he might fee and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and furvey of vice is in this world fo neceffary to the conftituting of human virtue and the scanning of errour to the confirmation of truth, how can we more fafely, and with less danger scout into the regions of fin and falfity, than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promifcuoufly read. But of the harm that may refult hence, three kinds are usually reckoned. First, is feared the infection that may spread; but then, all human learning and controverfy in religious points muft remove out of the world, yea, the Bible itself; for that ofttimes relates blafphemy not nicely, it defcribes the carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holieft men paffionately murmuring against providence through all the arguments of Epicurus; in other great difputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader; and ask a Talmudist what ails the modefty of his marginal Keri, that Mofes and all the prophets cannot perfuade him to pronounce the textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know the Bible itself put by the papift into the first rank of prohibited books. The ancienteft fathers must be next removed, as Clement of Alexandria,

and