Two Orations on the Political Question: Whether the Children of Lutherans Can Be Sent to Jesuit Schools with a Clear Conscience

They strain. The fatal machine climbs the walls,
heavy with arms.

At night, however, when they themselves were buried in wine and sleep:

Sinon stealthily releases the Greeks enclosed
in the womb, and the pinewood bars. The horse, opened,
returns them to the air, and they gladly emerge from the hollow oak.

The guards are slaughtered, and with open gates
they welcome all their allies, and join the knowing bands.

With what result? With what fate for Troy? A most miserable one, truly, and one to be lamented even by the enemy. For thus Aeneas complains with a groan:

We were Trojans, Ilium existed, and the great
Glory of the Teucrians; savage Jupiter has transferred
everything to Argos; the Greeks rule in the burned city.

The same, indeed, or even worse if one must speak the truth, is Germany—alas, once our most flourishing homeland—which, if there were faith in those where there ought to be the most, could easily have contended with any kingdoms

or whatever else, certainly more than the Elysian Fields, or those Utopian ones in China, might be imagined or painted by the idle and odious men of Parnassus, in the piety and devotion of the subjects, the virtue and strength of the citizens, the longevity and continuous succession of Princes and illustrious families, the equity and sincerity of laws and customs, the pleasantness and fertility of the fields, the clarity and firmness of cities and arts, the purity and wholesomeness of rivers and fountains, the fruitfulness and happiness of the flocks, has for so many years now experienced, with groans and tears, and still experiences every day, its fortune.

For not only has this most clear dwelling of a most clear empire, and the German Republic, and the life of all of us—our goods, fortunes, wives, and children—been called by the most sworn enemies of Christ and Christians to exile and devastation, indeed to total deletion and slaughter, in the memory of our fathers as well; they burned altars and temples, overturned schools, removed, cast out, and suppressed all human and divine laws, and in the holy place substituted that most base and criminal thief, Mahomet—that beast and son of lying—partly, and partly that Babylonian whore A common Reformation-era polemical reference to the Roman Catholic Church, derived from Revelation 17., and her pretty and beautiful lovers, and they did not hesitate to pollute their wicked souls and stain their impious hands with this most foul sacrilege of plundered divine things: But also the Sinons

have rushed into and crept into this, our most beloved fatherland, in the face of Jacob but with the feeling and mind of Esau, or rather of Phalaris, and have inflicted such pain in these times that now it seems to me that not only men, but not even the cattle can endure it. I pass over the others, whom Italy has armed for so many years for the ruin of Germany, and sent forth until now like a Trojan horse to strip the Germans of their liberty, to fleece them of their wealth, to wound their spirits, to lead them away from Christ, the true Groom, and to betroth them to the Babylonian whore—the Milones Referring to Milo of Croton, a legendary wrestler, often used metaphorically for strong, aggressive agents of external power.: The Jesuit, indeed, those sowers and stuffers of crimes, the Jesuits, and companions not of Jesus, but of Gehazi A biblical reference to the greedy servant of Elisha, suggesting the Jesuits are corrupt and money-seeking., who, by nefarious crime and the bond of iniquity, have thrived most successfully in our churches—after the light was lit again by the direct guidance of JEHOVAH and the restoration of Luther—to burn the fruits of the divine Word, like the foxes of Samson tied and bound together by their tails, they have surpassed every Sinon-like art—what it is, of what kind, and how great it is—and with their new chemistry, or rather their cunning cabalistic Often used in this period to denote suspicious, secret, or occult knowledge. arts, they have extracted the oil of all perfidy and wickedness from the discarded dross of the Ethno-Papists, and have so tempered it in their turbulent and bloody councils—though secretly and in their own distilling furnace—that virtue appears on the forehead, while vice lies hidden in the heart.