conveniences. Neither is conscience seldom misled by education, custom, and the false representation of teachers who, benighted in the dark interests of covetousness and ambition, seek to lodge others under the roof of such institutes as they believe not themselves, yet employ all their art, sufficiency, and endeavor to make them pass for authentic and the pure mind of God; like jugglers that beguile our senses with what is not, to have the better opportunity to pick our pockets of what is really useful to themselves. For as the more subtle wind, got into the narrow and delicate parts of our body, is able to act the stone, gout, and other most acute diseases not really present, so doth superstition represent in this changeable and concave-glass of a suborned conscience things for sinful that are indeed but natural and indifferent, and others pious that are really vain and destructive; the prosecution of which leads readily to atheism or an over-biassed holiness which prosecutes all that carry the impress of any contrary tenets.

28. Be not easily drawn to lay the foul imputation of witchcraft upon any, much less to assist at their condemnation, too common among us. For who is sufficient for these things, since we are as ignorant in the benevolences as malignities of nature, madmen presenting in their melancholy ecstasies as prodigious confessions and gestures as are objected to these no less infatuated people? And if this humor hath so far prevailed with some as to take themselves for urinals, wolves, and what not, can it seem impossible for those invaded by all the causes of discontent to imagine themselves authors of what they never did, most of these strange miracles they suppose being hatched by the heat of imagination or snatched out of the huge mass of contingencies such a multitude of individuals

as the world produceth cannot choose but stumble upon. Neither may it be admitted, with due reverence to the divine nature, that prophecy should cease and witches so abound as seems by their frequent executions, which makes me think the strongest fascination is encircled within the ignorance of the judges, malice of the witnesses or stupidity of the poor parties accused.

29. Be not therefore hasty to register all you understand not in the black calendar of hell, as some have done the weapon-salve, passing by the cure of the King's Evil altogether as improbable to sense. Neither rashly condemn all you meet with that contradicts the common received opinion, lest you should remain a fool upon record, as the Pope doth that anathematized the Bishop of Salzburg for maintaining antipodes, and the Consistory that may possibly attain the same honor for decreeing against the probable opinion of the earth's motion, since the branding of one truth imports more disrepute than the broaching of ten errors, these being only lapses in the search of new reason without which there can be no addition to knowledge, than a murdering of it when by others' greater wit and industry it is begotten-not to be accounted less than an unpardonable sin against the spirit of learning. Therefore mingle charity with judgment and temper your zeal with discretion, so may your own fame be preserved without intrenching upon that of others.

LORD CLARENDON

OF LIBERTY

LIBERTY is the charm which mutinous and seditious persons use to pervert and corrupt the affections of weak and wilful people and to lead them into rebellion against their princes and lawful superiors. En illa, quam saepe optastis, libertas,1 said Catiline, when he would draw the poor people into a conspiracy against the commonwealth. And in that transportation men are commonly so weak and wilful that they insensibly submit to conditions of more restraint and compulsion, and in truth to more and heavier penalties for the vindication of their liberty than they were ever liable to in the highest violation of their liberty of which they complain, by how much the articles of war are more severe and hard to be observed than the strictest injunctions under any peaceable government. However, no age hath been without dismal and bloody examples of this fury, when the very sound of liberty (which may well be called a charm) hath hurried those who would sacrifice to it to do and to suffer all the acts of tyranny imaginable, and to make themselves slaves that they may be free. There is no one thing that the mind of man may lawfully desire and take delight in, that is less understood and more fatally mistaken than the word liberty, which, though no man is so mad as to say it consists in being absolved from all obligations of law, which would give every man 1 Behold that liberty which you have often desired.

liberty to destroy him, yet they do in truth think it to be nothing else than not to be subject to those laws which restrain them from doing somewhat they have a mind to do; so that whoever is carried away upon that seditious invitation hath set his heart upon some liberty that he affects, a liberty for revenge, a liberty for rapine, or the like, which, if owned and avowed, would seduce very few, but being concealed, every man gratifies himself with such an image of liberty as he worships, and so concur together to overthrow that government that is inconvenient to them all, though disliked by very few in one and the same respect. And therefore the strength of rebellion consists in the private gloss which every man makes to himself upon the declared argument of it, not upon the reasons published and avowed, how specious and popular soever; and thence it comes to pass that most rebellions expire in a general detestation of the first promoters of them by those who kept them company in the prosecution and discover their ends to be very different from their profession.

True and precious liberty, that is only to be valued, is nothing else but that we may not be compelled to do anything that the law hath left in our choice whether we will do or no, nor hindered from doing anything we have a mind to do and which the law hath given us liberty to do if we have a mind to it; and compulsion and force in either of these cases is an act of violence and injustice against our right and ought to be repelled by the sovereign power, and may be resisted so far by ourselves as the law permits. The law is the standard and the guardian of our liberty; it circumscribes and defends it. But to imagine liberty without a law, is to imagine every man with his sword in his hand to destroy him who is weaker than himself; and

that would be no pleasant prospect to those who cry out most for liberty. Those men, of how great name and authority soever, who first introduced that opinion that nature produced us in a state of war, and that order and government was the effect of experience and contract, by which man surrendered the right he had by nature to avoid that violence which every man might exercise upon another, have been the authors of much mischief in the world by infusing into the hearts of mankind a wrong opinion of the institution of government, and that they may lawfully vindicate themselves from the ill bargains that their ancestors made for that liberty which nature gave them, and they ought only to have released their own interest and what concerned themselves, but that it is most unreasonable and unjust that their posterity should be bound by their ill-made and unskilful contracts. And from this, resentment and murmur, war and rebellion have arisen, which commonly leave men under much worse condition than their forefathers had subjected them to. Nor is it strange that philosophers, who could imagine no other way for the world to be made but by a lucky convention and conjunction of atoms, nor could satisfy their own curiosity in any rational conjecture of the structure of man or from what omnipotency he could be formed and created-I say it is no wonder that men so much in the dark as to matter of fact should conceive by the light of their reason that government did arise in that method and by those argumentations which they could best comprehend capable to produce such a conformity. But that men who are acquainted with the scriptures and profess to believe them, who thereby know the whole history of the creation and have therein the most lively representation of all the excesses and defects of nature, who see the order and