[462]: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.
[463]: Dans son Areopagitica.
[464]: What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferula, to come under the fescue of an imprimatur? if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great arguments to think himself reputed in the commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done, he takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that wrote before him; if in this, the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities, can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings, and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing; and if he be not repulsed, or slighted, must appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety, that he is no idiot or seducer; it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning.
[465]: Yet these are the men cryed out against for schismatick 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 the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united in a continuity, it can be but contiguous in this world; nay, rather, the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionnal, arises the goodly and graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.
[466]: Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansionhouse, of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war has not there more anvils and hammers waking, 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 with their homage and fealty the approaching Reformation. What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies?
[467]: 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.
[468]: Le mot anglais est plus vrai et plus frappant: peasantly regard.
[469]: If in less noble and almost mechanick arts he is not esteemed to deserve the name of a compleat architect, an excellent painter, or the like, that bears not a generous mind above the peasantly regard of wages and hire, much more must we think him a most imperfect and incompleat Divine, who is so far from being a contemner of filthy lucre, that his whole Divinity is moulded and bred up in the beggarly and brutish hopes of a fat prebendary, deanery, or bishoprick.
[470]: In this manner the Prelats coming from a mean and plebeian life, on a sudden, to be lords of stately palaces, rich furniture, delicious fare, and princely attendance, thought the plain and home-spun verity of Christ's gospel unfit any longer to hold their Lordship's acquaintance, unless the poor thread-bare matron were put into better clothes; her chast and modest veil surrounded with celestial beams, they overlaid with wanton tresses, and in a flaring attire bespeckled her with all the gaudy allurements of a whore.
[471]: What greater debasement can there be to Royal dignity, whose towering and stedfast heights rest upon the immovable foundations of justice and heroic virtue, than to chain it, in a dependance of subsisting or ruining, to the painted battlements and gaudy rottenness of prelatry, which wants but one puff of the king to blow them down like a paste-board house built of court cards.