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

the houses of God, where the ladder of Jacob is placed against heaven, by which angels descend and men again, who after this life are also destined to be isangeloi equal to angels or hos angeloi as angels, ascend. They are that Parnassus distinguished by two peaks, of which one is dedicated and consecrated not to Apollo, but to the Church; the other not to Bacchus, but to the Republic. Thus, both the Church and the Republic may seek and obtain from there those teachers from whom, in time of peace and war, Greece could ask for and obtain Oracles far more happily than from the tripod of Apollo, and the Roman Numa could seek and obtain counsel better than his from Egeria. On the contrary, those places in which there is deep silence regarding these things, or which are certainly wrapped in much empty superstition, covered in various mists, and surrounded on all sides by infinite monsters, are not scholae schools, but more truly cholae bile/gall, which Diogenes used to say about the play of Euripides. They infect the entire body of the Church and the Republic with their poison, and often introduce various diseases and even extreme panolethrian total destruction. They are truly those lakes of Ethiopia:

—which, if anyone has drunk from their jaws,
either he raves or suffers a wondrous heavy sleep.

They are those fields in which the sown teeth of the Dragon produce nothing but armed men who are most prepared in spirit, and most instructed in art, practice, and craftiness, to attack the Church, vex the Republic, and overturn all good orders. They are that sea in which the ships of Alcinous are turned into stones—that is, those who were to be vessels of divine mercy and salutary organs of the Church, and fruitful to themselves and their own as ships for importing good merchandise—they now lose every sense of piety, cast off all affections toward their own, and reject all philanthropian humanity, so that you would swear they were born from a rock or flint, or sown from mushrooms, as formerly:

—in the first age, the ancients called mortal
bodies produced from rainy mushrooms

or were reared and educated by tigers themselves. I believe you understand now, Auditors, what Lydian stone must be applied in testing and examining schools, and what proving fire must be kindled, so that, as if having...