The pastors of the Church have received a divine command to guard the integrity of faith and to watch over the purity of morals. Therefore have they also received from God that authority which is necessary for the due fulfilment of this high charge. And such is the authority to prohibit and, as far as may be, to repress those publications of which the only tendency is to introduce error and to disseminate vice. For it is impossible to preserve truth incorrupt in a community, if error may be circulated without restriction, dressed up in the delusive garb of sophistry; it is impossible to preserve morals pure, if vice may be freely exhibited in the most seductive and alluring forms. A great writer and a wise philosopher, Samuel Johnson, even though a Protestant, had the vigour of mind to seize this important principle, which he has expressed with a singular felicity of diction and an epigrammatic power peculiarly his own: “If every murmurer at government”, he says, “may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every sceptic in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion”.(3) We confess indeed that this is a question full of difficulty to members of the Protestant Church. They believe that each one has a right to judge for himself what is true and what is false: and it is not easy to see how this right can be exercised, unless each one be free to examine every form of belief, every variety of error. But we are at a loss to understand how a Catholic should go astray on a subject so plain. From the earliest ages the Catholic Church has ever claimed and exercised the right to condemn and prohibit those books which are contrary to faith and dangerous to morals. Now it would be an error in doctrine to suppose that the Catholic Church could claim such a right if she had not received it from her Divine Founder. If we pass from the doctrine of Milton to his arguments, we shall have much greater reason to wonder how it should have come to pass that we are asked, by a Catholic lecturer, to accept his views. He does not defend the circulation of bad books as a necessary evil, which it is inexpedient or impossible to check. On the contrary, he maintains it is a positive good, which ought to be encouraged. According to his notion, the promiscuous reading of bad books is the furnace in which our love for truth and virtue is to be tried. There can be no merit in truth, he argues, for him who is not acquainted with error; there can be no merit in virtue for him who is not familiar with vice. These are sentiments so utterly repugnant to the common instincts of our nature, that we could not believe they came from our illustrious poet, if his own words did not bear witness against him:—