fted up our apprehensions
degrees above themselves.

Ye can not make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly
pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us
so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can
grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but
you then must first become that which ye can not be, oppressive,
arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That
our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the
search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue
of your own virtue propagated in us; ye can not suppress that, unless
ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may dispatch
at will their own children. And who shall then stick closest to ye,
and excite others? not he who takes up arms for coat and conduct, and
his four nobles of Danegelt. Altho I dispraise not the defense of
just immunities, yet love my peace better, if that were all. Give me
the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties.

VI

OF FUGITIVE AND CLOISTERED VIRTUE[83]

I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks
out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not
without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the
world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial,
and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a
youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that
vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue,
not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was
the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known
to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true
temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer
through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he
might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and
survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of
human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth,
how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions
of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing
all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may