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

having seized a lantern even at midday, we might search for not just men, as Diogenes did, but for the workshops of true religion and erudition—the schools—and be able to properly separate and distinguish them from the caves of Trophonius or even from the meeting-places of wickedness and all impiety. I do not pursue this at greater length, lest I appear to be carrying owls to Athens or applying a torch to the manifest sun (for to which seven-year-old boy in our schools are these things not most well-known?). For just as to cite manifest things is either ostentation or superstition, as Scaliger says, so also to confirm and corroborate with many foundations—those sought from on high—things which boys find in a bean, or which nature itself suggests, or which experience teaches, or which finally firm deduction builds, is to fish with a net in the air:

Then, most of all, so that we may be able to look into that Augean stable of the Jesuits all the better, and to drag that Cacus out of his cave, or certainly to point it out with a clear sign, so that even though he, like the Virgilian one:

Vomits huge smoke from his jaws (a wonder to tell),
and wraps the house in blind darkness,
snatching the view from the eyes and gathering a smoky
night under the cave, with darkness mixed with fire.

Nevertheless,

The stolen oxen and the abjured thefts
are shown to the sky, and the misshapen corpse
is dragged out by the feet.

This is something that can hardly be accomplished and fully expedited in one month, let alone an hour. For:

The complications are long, the injury is long. But
—I will follow the highest summits of things.

Come then, oh come, Auditors, now approach the schools and palaces of the Jesuits—more than Alexandria—in your minds with me. Look back at the benches of the learners, turn through the libraries, look at the pulpits of the teachers and the walls; indeed, listen attentively to the Rector or Father...