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

is given to the fine distinctions of the Sorbonists scholars of the Sorbonne/Parisian theologians, which, like the chains of Vulcan, bind both Mars and Venus themselves, but only expose them to the mockery and hissing of all the Gods, if heaven is indeed opened. But it consists in the firm examples of the Philosophers, adapted to the art of the course of human life, which, having been acquired from this marketplace of men, show what is unjust, what must be done, and what must be omitted—like living laws carved in bronze, or tablets hung before the speakers' platforms—and subject them to the eyes of all. Finally, it is not circumscribed by empty loquacity, which, like the Ovidian Echo, where

only the voice and the mouth remain,
gives sound without a mind, or rather, it is a voice and nothing more. But it consists in decent eloquence, which, with the weight of facts, urges like a club, and moves with words as if with the golden chains of Hercules, and leaves most tenacious barbs in the minds of the listeners. Eruditio Learning is that lyre of Orpheus, by which he is said to have moved stones, dragged mountains and ash trees, tamed and bent tigers and lions, and even shaken Tartarus itself—that is, to have led men who were not men, and true giants, to a calmer way of living and to fruitfulness. Eruditio is that head of Medusa, by which men are changed in a different way, not into stones (that is, into the wicked and insipid), but from stones into men (that is, into the just and civilized). Eruditio is that Golden Bough, shown not by Venus and her little doves, but by Pallas Athena, that is, by diligence, with whose help, just as Aeneas did, we can easily free ourselves from all hardships and cross the river Styx without any shipwreck; that is, we can overcome lies spread against us without receiving any stain, and ward off from ourselves various incursions and violent attacks, partly at the threshold and in the first jaws of Orcus the underworld, and partly in the very midst of Orcus—that is, we can crush, refute, and push back from our necks the many calumnies of the Sophists offered partly at the very threshold of our calling and partly in the middle of our course.

Therefore, these two, which are inculcated in the schools, are...