Comm 201, Week 2
EXCERPTS FROM AREOPATIGA, BY JOHN MILTON (1644)
I conceive … 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 our 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 demeanor of every
grown man. … 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.
*****
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 warfaring 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.
*****
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.
*****
… that if it come to inquistioning
again and licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves and so suspicious
of all men as to fear each book and the shaking of every leaf, before we know
what the contents are; if some who but of late were little better than silenced
from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they
please, it cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over
learning …
*****
Well knows he who uses to consider,
that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and
complexion. Truth is compared in
scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual
progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if
he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so
determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the
very truth he holds becomes his heresy.
There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another
than the charge and care of their religion.
*****
Another sort there be, who, when
they hear that all things shall be ordered, all things regulated and settled,
nothing written but what passes through the custom-house of certain publicans
that have the tonnaging and the poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will
straight give themselves up into your hands, make ‘em and cut ‘em out what
religion ye please. There be delights,
there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun
to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that
which others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own
purveying? These are the fruits which a
dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the
people. How goodly, and how to be
wished, were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would
it starch us all into! Doubtless a
stanch and solid piece of framework, as any January could freeze together.
*****
For who knows not that Truth is
strong, next to the Almighty. She needs
no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious—those are
the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when
she sleeps, for then she speak not true …
Yet is it not impossible that she
may have more shapes than one.