Ondersoek en antwoord [...] op 't request door de gedeputeerden der Noordhollandsche synode tot Edam

-fute it either. For if that happens, the person who does so will have to put the forbidden book word for word, or at least the sense of it, into his own work. If he does not do the first, the reader will hardly understand him; if he omits the second, he will not understand this refutation at all. But if he does either of them, he is reprinting with his book that which was not allowed to be printed, according to the prohibition placed upon it. I know someone will say to this that the forbidden book, with that refutation alongside it, can do no harm: for that poison (if it is hidden in there) then has an antidote! But why does a book that is out of the world need to be refuted? One must consider it as something where the prohibition can no longer be found. How shall one also be assured that it is well refuted, as long as the author of the forbidden book has not answered it in turn? Which not being permitted to him, he is undoubtedly done an injustice: being forced to let himself be beaten, while his hands and feet are first bound. Certainly, this is a way of doing things that cannot exist with any well-ordered Government. But besides that, the book not yet being answered, someone could easily come to the thought that more common sense will easily overturn the reasons that the unlearned find confusing. But if that refutation does not hold up well: then the reader will be all the more confirmed in the opinion that was not well refuted. And so he has propagated more error than the book itself was capable of doing. I lack no examples of this from experience. A learned man wrote of another that, having wanted to refute Socinus Fausto Sozzini, an Italian theologian whose followers, Socinians, denied the Trinity with his book, he had made even more Socinians. So it has also gone until today with my present book. Those who out of prejudice refused to read it have done so anyway after they had read some books or heard sermons and understood from them that the reasons which they thought famous writers or preachers had to refute my opinion were of no power. Afterward, reading mine, they found themselves convinced by it. Indeed, I know those who by such and similar means have come completely to my opinion and also fight for it, however much they were against it at first. Therefore, as has been said, this style of resisting errors and watching over the truth by merely forbidding books is a practice that best fits the Papacy, which it does not become us to follow: since we do not lack men who are capable of refuting errors, and human domination struggles against our doctrine. This is as much as concerns the objective and the content of the Petition: which being thus noted in general first, it appears from the aforesaid reasons that it is unnecessary, unbecoming, and detrimental to the advancement of knowledge and the defense of the truth.

The opportunity of the time excuses me in part from further work, which was to show that such a Petition can have no effect, such as it is. For I would have wanted to say, if I had