Areopagitica | Page 7

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 attainment of what is truest. I conceive,
therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man's body,
saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left

arbitrary the dieting and repasting 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 so great a trust,
without particular law or prescription, 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 sufficed the heartiest
feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions which enter into a man,
rather than issue out of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to
captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him
with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work
left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon
those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation.
Solomon informs us, that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; but
neither he nor other inspired author tells us that such or such 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 wearisome. As for the burning of those Ephesian books by St.
Paul's converts; 'tis replied the books were magic, the Syriac so renders
them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary
imitation: the men in remorse burnt those books which were their own;
the magistrate by this example is not appointed; these men practised the
books, another might perhaps have read them in some sort usefully.
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. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the
contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to
her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her
whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why
our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a
better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance
under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the
cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and
know, and yet abstain. 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.
But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usually reckoned.
First, is feared the infection that may spread; but then all human
learning and controversy