On the Petition etc.

the second year, who again criticized the previous work, not only of mine but also of the Deputies who were their predecessors, and they put a spoke in the wheel. I already had permission by decree from the Honorable Lords of the Provincial States original: "Gedeputeerde Staten" to publish it. Nonetheless, these men managed to stall the work again. To set it right once more, I made no new effort. But it was approved by those same men, without me changing anything more in it, in the first Synodus after I had left Friesland due to my call to Loenen.

original: "Ereptum ex oculis quærimus invidi"

One must not think that I retracted more then than I do now, as many have let themselves be persuaded. I have done nowhere near as much now as I did then, and my book was approved in the same way it had been condemned. They then retracted, and not I. It seems unbelievable, and yet it is true. I shall let the reader see it for himself if God lets us live to the end of this year (as was said).

But let someone tell me: how shall the State, when things go this way, rely on the complaints and petitions of the clergy to have a book forbidden? When it pleases the State, it may well have reasons for it. Often there is no reason other than the impolite persistence of such complainers, and the Lords rid themselves of them in this way, or to prevent themselves from being cried out as Atheisten Atheists or at least irreligious from the pulpits, and thus being burdened with the hatred of the people. For nothing other than human passion, and no sound judgment, will ever advise the forbidding of such books.

If anyone thinks otherwise, I will tell him the reasons I have always considered within myself and, when appropriate, also mentioned in public. First is the question of whether one may forbid such books that do not concern Zeden morals or ethics but belong solely to knowledge? Regarding Morals, we have an innate light through which we ourselves, as if from an inborn law, can be our own judges, our thoughts accusing or excusing us. Romans 2:14. Additionally, even an unlettered person knows for himself what is honest or dishonest; what is love or hate; what is right or wrong; that lying, stealing, fighting, drunkenness, and fornicating are sins; that an honest man must keep his word; that schism, riot, and mutiny are punishable.

But what the nature of spirits may be; how this or that passage of Scripture must be translated according to the nature of the Greek or the Hebreeuwsch Hebrew; what the opinion of scholars has been for over sixteen centuries, whether it has been changeable or unchangeable, and more such things concerning the knowledge of matters that are uncertain and must therefore be retrieved with great effort: these are not things for which everyone's judgment is so ready. Therefore, everyone must be free to search for them, and to say or write what he has found; just as every