Areopagitica

Marc Chagall's Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (1954-67)

"It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the world. And perhapse this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill...He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: what which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary... Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason?"

My rational for freedom of expression and the Christian freedom to experience that expression was borrowed from Milton, whom I discovered through Prof. Horner, who said "The highest form of censorship is a discriminating mind."

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