ill abroad, than household gluttony? Who shall be the rectors of our daily rioting? And what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes that frequent those houses where 690 drunkenness is sold and harboured? 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, male and female together, as is the fashion of this country? 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? These things will be, and must be; but how they shall be least hurtful, how least enticing, herein consists the grave and governing wisdom 700 of a state/To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed us unavoidably Nor is it Plato's licensing of books will do this, which necessarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious and civi nurture, which 710 Plato there mentions as the bonds and gaments of the commonwealth, the pillars and sustainers of every written statute these they be willch will bear chief sway in such matters as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and remissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. 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, what praise 720 could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent Many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes: herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore 730 did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when this. is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left: ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects 740 of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not thither so; such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look, how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike. This justifies the high Providence of God, Who, though He commands us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things, 750 and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. 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 & It would be better done, to learn that the law must needs be frivolous which goes to restrain things uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to evil. And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing. For God sure esteems 760 740. bereave, A.S. bereafian = to rob. 745. look, &c. In modern English we should write, "According as we thus expel sin, so to the same extent we also expel virtue." The virtue or vice lies in the resisting or yielding. 753. scanting, giving scant measure of. M.E. scant, Ice landic skamt = short. 756. that the law, that that 757. uncertainly, i.e., at the whim or judgment of a licenser. 758. dram, contracted from the Greek word drachmē-a small coin. |