Chapter VIII · THE CENSORSHIP OF THE STATE AND CENSORSHIP BY PROTESTANTS (continued 2)

The practice of burning books was continued by the Puritans, who also utilised for the purpose the services of the common hangman. One book so burned (in 1619) was the King’s Book of Sports, issued by James in 1618, on the advice of Morton, Bishop of Chester. It had been ordered to be read in all churches throughout England. Copies were publicly burned in a number of the Puritan counties.

The regulations for the control of the press in England were more strenuous under the Commonwealth and the later Stuarts than before the death of Charles I. Between the years 1637–1681, more than two hundred books came upon the condemnation lists. Among the works condemned and prohibited by Cromwell was the Areopagitica of Milton, published in 1644. In 1646, was condemned the book by John Biddle (known as the father of modern Unitarianism) which bore the title: Twelve Arguments from Scripture in regard to the Divinity of the Holy Ghost. The author was imprisoned and the copies of the book burned. The censor of the press under the last two Stuarts was Roger L’Estrange. The penalties in force at the time he assumed the office providing for the destruction of books, the imprisonment and in certain cases the death of the authors and printers, were, in his judgment, not sufficiently severe. He beseeched Parliament to give him authority to add to these penalties stocks, public whipping, the cutting off of the hand, the cutting out of the tongue, etc. A printer named Trogan, who came under the disapproval of the censor, was executed in 1686, with various revolting details.

In 1642, the Parliament condemned and ordered burned by the hangman five publications written by Royalists. In each succeeding year, similar action was taken with publications (mainly pamphlets) written in opposition to the control of Parliament. A more serious matter for the authors than the burning of the books was that of the fines. Joseph Primatt, for instance, in 1652, was fined five thousand pounds for the publication of a petition to Parliament, and Lilburne was in the same year fined seven thousand pounds. The first theological work dealt with by Parliament was a treatise by John Archer entitled Comfort for believers about their Sinnes and Troubles. This was published in 1645 and in the same year was, under the order of Parliament, publicly burned in four places. In September, 1650, a monograph by Lawrence Clarkson entitled Single Eye, All light, no darkness, was condemned to be burned by the hangman and Clarkson, after being imprisoned for a month, was sentenced to banishment for life. These instances are selected from a long series of similar condemnations merely in order to make clear that the theory of the Parliament in regard to the right and the duty of the Government to prevent the circulation of pernicious literature (that is to say, literature the opinions of which were not in accord with those of the existing authorities) differed in no way from that of the supporters of royalty. A similar series of condemnations, with burning of the books and fining of the authors, together with an occasional exposure in the pillory, was continued through the Restoration. In the year 1690, a treatise by Arthur Bury, rector of Exeter College, Oxford, issued under the title of the Naked Gospels, was ordered burned under the authority of the University of Oxford.

In 1698, a Scotchman named Aikenhead, who was at the time a student of but eighteen years of age, was hanged at Edinburgh, not on account of any heresies brought into print, but simply because in some wild talk he had referred to Christianity as a delusion. Under one of the statutes of Scotland, it was a capital crime to revile or to curse the Supreme Being or any person of the Trinity. The words used by the young man were not strictly within the definition of the statute, but this statute was, under the direction of James Stuart, Lord Advocate of Scotland, used to bring the boy to execution.[85]

The censorship laws were not repealed as an immediate result of the Revolution of 1688 but endured until 1695. The regulations then established maintained for the Crown the full authority to control the operations of the press, but the penalties were made much less severe. Among the books condemned under the new legislation were Christianity not Mysterious, by John Toland, Thoughts concerning Human Souls, by William Coward, and the Fable of the Bees, by Mandeville, in 1723. (The last had been published as far back as 1706). Mandeville’s volume was made the subject of a presentment by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. The book was described as “a public nuisance, having a tendency to the subversion of all religion, the undermining of civil government, and the impairment of our duty to the Almighty.” No penalty was inflicted, or ordered, upon the author, nor was the book itself suppressed.[86]

Among the books condemned in the succeeding years were The Doctrine of the Trinity, by Samuel Clark, and the Miracle of Our Saviour, by Thomas Woolston. The author of the latter was fined twenty-five pounds and was then imprisoned until he could raise two thousand pounds. He died after four years’ imprisonment.

In 1701, a treatise by John Asgill on the Covenant of Eternal Life was burned by the order of two Parliaments, English and Irish. In 1702, the famous essay by Defoe, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, was burned by the hangman under order of Parliament and Defoe was sentenced to three days’ punishment in the pillory, to a ruinous fine, and to a long imprisonment. The trial of Saccheverell brought about the burning, in 1710, of a long series of books, including his own sermons and works by both his supporters and adversaries. In 1707, the Grand Jury of Middlesex made a presentment characterising as a public nuisance the essay by Matthew Tyndale entitled the Rights of the Christian Church. Tyndale reflects that this proceeding will further “the wider circulation of one of the best books that have been published in our age among many people that would not otherwise have heard of it.” It was burned by the hangman in 1710. In 1722, the Commons agreed with the resolution of the Peers to have burned at the Royal Exchange the declaration of the Pretender issued as the declaration of James III. In 1763, numbers of the North Briton, of John Wilkes, who was then himself a member of the House, were, under an order of the two Houses, condemned to be burned at the Royal Exchange. The author was expelled from the House, but secured, after a long contest, a re-election. A volume issued without name in 1775, under the title of The present Crisis in regard to America considered, was burned on the 24th of February of that year and is referred to as the last book which the English Parliament has condemned to the flames.

In 1795, Sheridan proposes to have publicly burned a treatise by Reeve entitled Thoughts on English Government, but his proposal was not supported. The press law, passed as late as December, 1819, imposed a penalty of transportation on the writers or printers of godless and revolutionary works. This law was repealed in 1837, and the legislation of 1869 finally secured an assured freedom for the press. It is the conclusion of Catholic writers, in summing up the history of what they call the exceptionally fierce and brutal censorship of England, that the responsibility for this rests with the original crime committed by the State against the Church universal; and with the continued and demoralising wrong caused by transferring the control of the Church to the civil authorities.

The history of political censorship, or of censorship by the State in England, is a large and complex subject to which in a work like this it is of course, possible only to make reference.

In 1877 was printed (privately) in London a catalogue which from the title has been classed with the Indexes: Index librorum prohibitorum; being notes bio-, biblio-, and icono-graphical and critical on curious and uncommon books, compiled by Pisanus Fraxi. This is, however, simply a list, probably prepared for commercial purposes, of obscene books.

4. Summary.—The instances cited are sufficient to show that the spirit of Protestantism, in each and all of the sects that came into power or influence in the State, has through the past centuries held it to be the right and duty of the Church, and of the State under the influence of the Church, to supervise and to control the productions of the printing-press and the reading of the people. The fact, however, that within the Protestant communion there were so many points of view, rendered it not only difficult but impossible to establish any consistent and continuing policy of censorship. There was also a lack of any effective machinery for carrying out, within these Protestant territories, such regulations as the censors of the Church might establish. In certain places and at certain times the civil authorities, like the magistrates of Geneva or the Elector of Saxony, were ready to utilise the force of the State for carrying out the decrees of the Church, but such co-operation and support were at best (or at worst) but intermittent and spasmodic. In Germany or in Switzerland, the authority of the State covered but a limited territory. If the censorship pressure became burdensome in one city, there was no essential difficulty in moving the composing-room and the press to some other place where the faith of the magistrates was not so “orthodox” or so strenuous. As a result, the Protestant writers, representing all schools of protest, found no continued difficulty in bringing their productions into print and in circulating these among sympathetic readers.

The Jesuit historian, while admitting that the condemnation of the Catholic Church has fallen upon certain works of unquestioned scholarly value, insists that the Protestant censorship of authors and books of similar standing has been, to say the least, no less severe. He maintains, further, that the Catholic policy and methods have been more consistent, more discriminating, more intelligent, and more moral in purpose and in effect than those of the Protestants. He emphasises the importance of distinguishing between the circles of readers for which different books are fitted, either to do service or to work injury. He writes: “The works of Grotius, Gibbon, and Guicciardini have a deserved repute with the scholars. We may admit, that scholars can derive from such works valuable instruction, but this does not make them suitable for the reading of the untrained or the half trained. The Church undertakes always to maintain this distinction.”

The Father sums up his arraignment of the censorship of the State by a bitter reference to the methods pursued by the Protestant Government of Prussia with its Catholic subjects in Poland. What answer can an instructor make in a school in Posen when a child asks why he is forbidden to read the Polish Catechism? The instructor can only say that the modern State is all powerful, and that in the execution of its self-imposed task of crushing out nationality, it is willing to take the responsibility not only for the interpretation of science, but for the shaping of belief.[87]

“Whence,” says Hilgers, “do the civil authorities secure the right to compel Catholic children to accept instruction from heretical books; and to prohibit the use in Catholic families, outside even of the walls of the official institutions, the use of Catholic books and documents? Here is a censorship tyranny with which in the history of Rome there is nothing to be compared.”