well proved; and his utterance, solemn and full of deep thought and erudition, is, as it were, forced and formal. But when he warms up with the greatness of his subject, he runs into a strain of grave eloquence which has scarcely an canal in the language. As a specimen, we may take this passage from his celebrated "Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. "It includes the principle of all religious freedom:—"There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meekness, nor can convince; yet all must be suppressed which is not found in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body of truth. To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth, as we find it—for all the body is homogeneal and proportionate; this is the golden rule of theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly-divided minds."
Allegorical Figure of a Commonwealth, from Hobbes' "Leviathan."
He continues: some good men too are alarmed at it. "They fret, and out of their own weakness are in agony; but these divisions and sub-divisions will undo us. The adversary again applauds and waits the hour; 'When they have branched themselves out,' saith he, 'small enough into parties and partitions, then will be our time.' Fool! he sees not the firm root out of which we all grow, though into branches; nor will he wait until he sees our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of his ill-united and unwieldy brigade. And that we are to hope better of all those supposed sects and schisms; and that we shall not need that solicitude—honest, perhaps, though over timorous—of them that rise in their behalf, but shall laugh in the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have these reasons to persuade me: first, when a city shall be, as it were, besieged and blocked about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to her walls and suburb trenches, that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues singular good-will, contentedness, and confidence in your prudent foresight and safe government of lords and commons, and from thence decides itself to a
