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

This page continues the author's argument, warning parents that the Jesuits intend to turn their children into instruments of Papal power through the subversion of true religion.

You must seriously decide that one must abstain from them and guard against them as if from a most present Malea A notoriously dangerous cape in Greece, often used metaphorically for extreme peril..

But if anyone holds us in mockery like Naso, or like Tityrus, or like the Plautine braggart soldier Referring to Pyrgopolynices, the boastful soldier in Plautus's Miles Gloriosus., treating us as scholastics, or like Marsyas The satyr who challenged Apollo and was flayed for his hubris. as men of the shadows, and thinks that nothing pertains to the public good, but that one should, like Diogenes, hide in one's own tub, we reply to this: that it is the duty of public professors, indeed of all good men, to avert the public ruin with all their strength and to block all cracks, lest that sea of iniquity and fanatic superstition inundate the whole Christian world, and carry off the herds with the stables, or rather, with the old trees, overwhelm all growing saplings with a perpetual inundation of errors and suffocate them in the very grass. This is what these men alone have in their prayers; they think of nothing else, they do nothing else, they plot nothing else, prepared even by their own ruin—if they cannot do it otherwise—to extinguish the fire. For this reason, we must watch more keenly and briskly for the public safety than they do for its destruction, nor should we make a stir or noise about these companions at all, since it is better to be oppressed by the burden of duty—which the public safety of those learning, which should be the highest law everywhere for those teaching, once imposed upon us with faith—than to lay it down because of the weakness of the mind, or to wrap it in perpetual silence because of the furies of those who are raging, lest after the deed is done we be like Prometheus, and having lost the herd, we close the gates, or finally bring help like Melitides only after Troy has already been overturned. Wherefore, auditors, come with me now into the present matter; weigh the use and end of the schools, examine the lot and safety of the youth to be educated, look with worthy eyes, as is fitting, upon the faith and truly paternal diligence of our teachers, and you will recognize that these hidden dens of the Jesuits—or rather their gallows, or more truly the cave of the thief Cacus or the stable of Augeas The Augean stable was a filth-ridden place that required a Herculean effort to clean; the author uses this to describe the Jesuit influence., for the cleansing of which not even three hundred Herculeses would suffice—are what they are, and can and should rightly be called so.

For to every student, in whatever study he may be engaged—as if in the stadium of the Muses—two ends are always proposed like the stars of Helen The Dioscuri, seen by sailors as guides and indicators of safe harbor., toward which all must align who do not wish to run "off the path" or to wander from the middle door, as they say: but on this road, to fight the good fight of faith under Christ, our only Emperor, to preserve a good conscience and faith, and to merit and keep the name of a good and learned man, namely: TRUE AND SINCERE RELIGION, and SOLID and sounder ERUDITION.

RELIGION is not the vain ringing of Dodonian brass, Referring to the oracle at Dodona, where priests interpreted the sounds of hanging bronze vessels.
or

clamor, and the Berecynthian horn,
cymbals, and applause, and Bacchic howls; not the silent murmuring of letters that are more than hieroglyphics; not the theatrical gesticulation of hands and head; not the Stentorian recitation of words not understood; not the admiration of the relics of Longinus or Pilate, or the prostrate adoration of Francis and Dominic; but the acquiescing assent of the heart and mind to the word of God in simple faith; the invocation of the one true God, one in essence and three in persons; the administration of the sacraments, as they were instituted by Christ himself a little before his agony; and the observance of rites, as they were introduced so that all things in the Church might be done "decently and in order." Religion is that which loosens our minds from these worldly chains—like Prometheus from the Caucasus—from the chains of desperation and distrust, as if by JOVIS Jupiter/God., and leads them to that upper arena of contemplations, or rather of Faith, so that a man, by a most happy "death" to the world, caught away in mind outside the prison of the body, might look upon these "great things of God" as if present, and preconceive in his soul that joy of the future life, truly a "psalm of life," burn with the Spirit, and desire to gaze upon his Redeemer face to face. Religion is the basis and foundation of all concord, which so unites and fortifies the minds of citizens that...