Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England — John Shaqi
Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of EnglandMilton, John
Philosophy
Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England
Milton, John
Freedom of the press -- Early works to 1800
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
of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious
forwardness among men, to reassume 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 in one general and brotherly
search after truth; could we but forgo 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 the 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 graceful symmetry that
commends the whole pile and structure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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