sions 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for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a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 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
hither 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 command us
temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a
profuseness, all desirable things, 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 dream of well-doing should be preferred before many times
as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems the
growth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of
ten vicious.

And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling,
or conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is of the same effect
that writings are, yet grant the thing to be prohibited were only books,
it appears that this Order hitherto is far insufficient to the end
which it intends. Do we not see, not once or oftener, but weekly, that
continued court-libel against the Parliament and City, printed, as the
wet sheets can witness, and dispersed among us, for all that licensing
can do? Yet this is the prime service a man would think, wherein this
Order sho