The World's Greatest Books — Volume 20 — Miscellaneous Literature and Index
General
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 20 — Miscellaneous Literature and Index
Literature -- Collections
'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations without
necessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vain things. To
both these objections one answer will serve--that to all men such books
are not temptations, nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials
wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong medicines. The
rest, as children and childish men, who have not the art to qualify
and prepare these working minerals, well may be exhorted to forbear,
but hindered forcibly they cannot be by all the licensing that sainted
Inquisition could ever yet contrive.
This Order of licensing conduces nothing to the end for which it was
framed. If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners,
we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful
to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is
grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture,
motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance
shall be thought honest. Our garments, also, should be referred to
the licensing of some more sober workmasters to see them cut into a
less wanton garb. Who shall regulate all the mixed conversation of our
youth? Who shall still appoint what shall be discoursed, what presumed,
and no further? Lastly, who shall forbid and separate all idle resort,
all evil company? If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe
years were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what
were virtue but a name?
When God gave Adam reason, he gave him reason to choose, for reason is
but choosing. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures
round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very
ingredients of virtue?
Why should we then affect a rigour contrary to the manner of God and
of nature, by abridging or scanting those means which books freely
permitted are both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth?
_IV.--An Indignity to Learning_
I lastly proceed from the no good it can do to the manifest hurt
it causes in being, first, the greatest discouragement and affront
that can be offered to learning and to learned men. If ye be loth to
dishearten utterly and discontent the free and ingenuous sort of such
as were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre or
any other end but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that
lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have
consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advance
the good of mankind, then know that so far to distrust the judgment and
the honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning, and never
yet offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor
and examiner, is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and
knowing spirit that can be put upon him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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