Francis Hirst on John Milton

“But though in his noble and self-imposed task, the Defence of Liberty, Milton drew inspiration from the poets, orators and philosophers of Greece, nevertheless he stands proudly eminent as the great original genius who first proclaimed to our modern world the truth that freedom to express our thoughts in speech and writing is of all liberties most to be prized.”

“To plead the cause of Freedom was, said Milton, his sole aim during the twenty years that followed the meeting of the Long Parliament. In one group of writings he upheld political freedom; in another the right to revise the moral and social code; in a third he called on the nation to establish religious toleration and to liberate the conscience from ecclesiastical supervision. Above all, in the Areopagitica, passing to the fundamental question which dominates all forms of liberty and is its final test, he pleaded with superb power and eloquence for the widest freedom of thought, for complete liberty, unhampered by censors or licensers, to reject, to choose and, if need be, to innovate and reform, because without that supreme freedom he felt there could be no health or progress in the moral and intellectual life of an individual or of a nation. “Give me the liberty,” he wrote, “to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties.””