“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645
Many there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgresse,
foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for
reason is but choosing... 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 re-
ward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he creat passions within us, pleasures
round about us, but that these rightly temper’d are the very ingredients of virtu? (527)
Confident that his core ethical principle is also God’s, he gives short shrift to Puri-
tan efforts to force outward conformity on the wicked: “God sure esteems the
growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more then the restraint of ten
vitious” (528).
The fourth argument describes how censorship harms church and state by its
affront to learned men, to learning, and to truth itself. That affront extends to
“every knowing person” alive or dead: to the common people who are supposed
“giddy, vitious, and ungrounded,” unable to be trusted with an English pamphlet
(536); and to ministers whose flocks are thought to be so ill-taught that “the whiffe
of every new pamphlet should stagger them out of thir catechism” (537). Their
repressive mindset makes Presbyterians no better than the bishops, and augurs ill for
the future: those who “startle thus betimes at a meer unlicens’d pamphlet will after
a while be afraid of every conventicle, and a while after will make a conventicle of
every Christian meeting” (541). Milton reminds those who decry heresy that faith
thrives by exercise, not passive acceptance, and that by sound Protestant principles
“A man may be a heretick in the truth” if he takes on implicit faith what his pastor
tells him (543). He meets the outcry against sects and schisms with a striking poetic
passage that produces an entire reversal of terms. Religious truth is not a unified
body at risk from divisive forces, but is already a dismembered and scattered body –
a female Osiris figure, evoking also the image of persecuted martyrs. The labors of
all questing scholarly adventurers are required to bring the parts together, a process
that cannot be finished until the Second Coming:
Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect
shape... [but later] arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the
Ægyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the
virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d them to the
four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear,
imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris, went up and
down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found
them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second comming.
... Suffer not these licencing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity
forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obse-
quies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint. We boast our light; but if we look not
wisely on the Sun it self, it smites us into darkness... The light which we have
gain’d, was giv’n us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things
more remote from our knowledge. (549–50)