each man's
discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or
nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not
unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good
nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is
of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in
many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
Whereof what better witness can ye expect I should produce, than one of
your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in
this land, Mr. Selden; whose volume of natural and national laws proves,
not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons
and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea
errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance
toward the speedy attainment of what is truest. I conceive, therefore,
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 demeanour of every grown
man. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews from heaven, that
omer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to have
been more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as
many meals. 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. Solomon informs us,
that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; but neither he nor other
inspired author tells us that such or such reading is unlawful: yet
certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much more
expedient to have told us what was unlawful than what was wearisome.
As for the burning of those Ephesian books by St. Paul's converts;
'tis replied the books were magic, the Syriac so renders them. It was
a private act, a vo