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 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 cannot
persuade him to pronounce the textual Chetiv. For these causes we all
know the Bible itself put by the Papist 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,