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, though 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 where any ignorant man hath been
ever seduced by papistical book in English, unless it were commended and
expounded to him by some of that clergy: and indeed all such tractates,
whether false or true, are as the prophecy of Isaiah was to the eunuch,
not to be UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT A GUIDE. But of our priests and doctors
how many have been corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits and
Sorbonists, and how fast they could transfuse that corruption into the
people, our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot, since the
acute and distinct Arminius was perverted merely by the perusing of a
nameless discourse written at Delft, which at first he took in hand to
confute.

Seeing, therefore, that those books, and those in great abundance, which
are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine, cannot be suppressed
without the fall of learning and of all ability in disputation, and that
these books of either sort are most and soonest catching to the learned,
from whom to the common people whatever is heretical or dissolute may
quickly be conveyed, and that evil manners are as perfectly learnt
without books a thousand other ways which cannot be stopped, and evil