be had of
books promiscuously read.

But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usually
reckoned. First, is feared the infection that may spread; but then all
human learning and controversy in religious points must remove out of
the world, yea the Bible itself; for that ofttimes relates blasphemy
not nicely, it describes the carnal sense of wicked men not
unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against
Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other great
disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader. And ask
a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginal Keri, that Moses and
all the prophets can not persuade him to pronounce the textual Chetiv.
For these causes we all know the Bible itself put by the Papist into
the first rank of prohibited books. The ancientest fathers must be
next removed, as Clement of Alexandria, and that Eusebian book of
Evangelic preparation, transmitting our ears through a hoard of
heathenish obscenities to receive the Gospel. Who finds not that
Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others discover more heresies than
they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is the truer opinion?

Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers of greatest
infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up the life of
human learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, so long as we
are sure those languages are known as well to the worst of men, who
are both most able, and most diligent to instil the poison they suck,
first into the courts of princes, acquainting them with the choicest
delights, and criticisms of sin. As perhaps did that Petronius whom
Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his revels; and the notorious
ribald of Arezzo,[84] dreaded and yet dear to the Italian courtiers. I
name not him for posterity's sake, whom Henry VIII named in merriment
his vicar of hell. By which compendious way all the contagion that
foreign books can infuse will find a passage to the people far easier
and shorter than an Indian voyage, tho it could be sailed either by
the north of Cataio eastward, or of Canada westward, while our Spanish
licensing gags the English press never so severely.

But on the other side that infection which is from books of
controversy in religion is more doubtful and dangerous to the learned
than to the ignorant; and yet those books must be permitted untouched
by the licenser. It will be hard to instance wher