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

or like a true Briareus a hundred-handed giant or Geryon a three-bodied monster, not with one, but with many hands and those most fortified in strength against enemies, they might fight and struggle; so that, like Argus the all-seeing giant with a hundred eyes, they might see not with a hundred, but with more than thousands of eyes; so that, like Rhadamanthus or Minos judges of the underworld, they might judge justice, although at other times.

By hostile necessity a reference to the inescapable pressure of enemies, they nonetheless announce to their own, and with their own scepter they soften the proud, extract the oppressed as if from the depths of Orcus, raise up the fallen, and lead the good to the highest Capitol of Honor and the most august temple of Fame.

ERUDITION Scholarship/Learning, in truth, does not consist in the frivolous petty questions of idle men, which are not unlike the tripod of the Muses, about which Plato affirms that if a Poet sits upon it, he is less in control of himself; thus, those questions plunge the fluctuating mind of the learner more deeply into the Ocean of doubts and finally even dash it completely against the cliffs. But it consists in the monuments truly extracted from the very depths of nature, which the wisest Monarch, GOD, erected in this theater, proposing them to be looked at and looked into: monuments wider than the walls of Babylon, more precious than the temple of Diana, more beautiful than the statue of Jupiter Olympius (though fashioned by Phidias), greater than the Egyptian pyramids, higher than the Colossus of the Sun, richer than the tomb of Mausolus, and more illustrious than the palace of Cyrus, although all these are cited among the miracles of the world. It does not lurk in the vain dreams of the frenzied, which, like the Virgilian Empusa a shapeshifting phantom, delude Turnus—who, although he anxiously sought Aeneas there, thus here the seeker of truth is deluded—and lead him far astray and seduce him from the camp of the Muses. But it consists in the sound precepts of the wise, which, like a ray of reason and the staff of Jacob a traveler's guide, extracted from the inner sanctum of nature and tested by the fire of more fervent experience, shine before those running into the ancient forest, and on all sides, like a walking stick to the hand, they prop up and sustain the mind. It does not consist in miserable...