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 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 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 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 fill 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
wayfaring 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 in religious points must remove out
of the world, yea the Bible itself; for that ofttimes relates
blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnal sense of wicked men
not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring
against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other
great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader.
And ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginal Keri, that
Moses and all the prophets cannot persuade him to pronounce the
textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know the Bible itself put by
the Papist into the first rank of prohibited books. The ancientest
fathers must be next removed, as Clement of Alexandria, and that
Eusebian book of Evangelic preparation, transmitting our ears
through a hoard of heathenish obscenities to receive the Gospel. Who
finds not that Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others discover
more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is
the truer opinion?

  Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers of
greatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up
the life of human learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, so
long as we are sure those languages are known as well to the worst
of men, who are both most able, and most diligent to instil the poison