Reading makes you moral

I can't really speak for my students, but I thought that Friday's Commonwealth/Restoration seminar went rather well. We discussed Areopagitica in the context of The Satanic Verses and Geert Wilders's Fitna (as expected, my Dutch students were very relaxed about such things), then looked at Bacon on the productive but destabilising social effects of single men, and all sorts of other things.

As a fan of reading, I'd like to draw your attention to these words:

…books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them… he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself…

Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice [this is Mark's defence] is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

(John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644)