=Source.=--Milton, _Prose Works_. Ed. Bohn. Vol. ii., p. 90.
_Areopagitica_, 1644.
Lords and commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye
are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull,
but of a quick ingenious and piercing spirit; acute to invent,
subtile and sinewy to discourse not beneath the reach of any point
the highest that human capacity can soar to.... Now once again by
all concurrence of signs and by the general instinct of holy and
devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God
is decreeing to begin some new and great period in His church; even
to the reformation 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 working, 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
toward 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, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious
forwardness among men, to reassure 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 into one general and
brotherly search after truth; could we but forego this prelatical
tradition, of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into
canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy
stranger should come among us, wise to discern the mould and temper
of a people, and how to govern it, observing the high hopes and
aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings
in the pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would cry out
as Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage, "If such
were my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that could
be attempted to make a church or kingdom happy." Yet these are the
men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries, as if, while
the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring
the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of
irrational men, who could not consider there must be many schisms
and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the
house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully
together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be
contiguous in this world; neither can every piece of building be of
one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of
many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not
vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the gracious symmetry
that commends the whole pile and structure.... 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 should you 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 up 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 you 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 arts: this it is 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 cannot 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 despatch at will their own children.... Give
me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties.