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

willing to devote and consecrate both the living and the dead to Satan himself, you must seriously determine to abstain and to guard against them as if from a most immediate and deadly trap.

And if indeed anyone, like some Naso a Roman reference to one with a large nose, often implying arrogance or a Tityrus a simple shepherd in Virgil's poetry, should mock us as if we were Plautine braggart soldiers, or as schoolmen, or like Marsyas a figure from mythology who challenged a god to a musical contest and was flayed for his arrogance—as if we were mere shadows of men—and should think that nothing pertains to the public good as it did to Parmenon or Palaemon references to classical grammarians or figures, but rather that Diogenes a Greek philosopher known for living in a tub should hide in his tub, we answer this: it is the duty of public professors, and indeed of all good men, to avert public disaster with all their might and to block all the cracks, lest that sea of iniquity and fanatical superstition flood the entire Christian world. It would snatch the herds along with the stables, and even with the old trees, it would overwhelm all the growing seedlings with a perpetual flood of errors and suffocate them while they are still in the blade. This is the only thing those men desire, they think of nothing else, do nothing else, and attempt nothing else, prepared even to extinguish the fire with their own ruin if they cannot do it otherwise.

For this reason, we must watch more keenly and alertly for the public safety the more they watch for our destruction. We must not make even the slightest noise or clatter of those companions, since it is better to be burdened by the weight of our office—which the public safety of students has once and for all imposed upon us with trust, and which must everywhere be the final law of those who teach—than to lay it aside because of weakness of spirit, or to wrap it in perpetual silence because of the furies of those who run wild. We must not be like Prometheus a figure representing foresight, here used to imply acting too late after the fact, or lock the gates after the cattle are lost, or—with Troy already fallen—finally bring aid like Melitides a legendary fool who was famously late to understand basic matters. Therefore, listeners, come now with me to the matter at hand. Consider the use and end of schools, examine the fate and safety of the youth to be educated, and look with worthy eyes, as is fitting, upon the truly fatherly faith and diligence of our own teachers. Look upon those hiding places of the Jesuits, or rather their gallows—more truly the cave of the robber Cacus a fire-breathing giant and thief in Roman mythology or the Augean stables a legendary stable that was so filthy it took the hero Hercules to clean it, for the cleaning of which not even three hundred Hercules the hero of Greek myth known for his strength would suffice.