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

certain one, survey the temples, walk through the chambers. Good God, what an ocean of impiety will you find and catch there! What a sewer of superstition, what a chain of pride and all vices, what luxury of the brothers and companions! What Charybdes and Scyllas of students, and partly what Sirens and Pandoras—artfully fashioned and stitched together by those little brothers! If even Ulysses himself, although the most polytropos versatile/wily of all, or Chrysippus, although most circumspect, or Argus, although all eye, or Prometheus, although the most prudent of all, were brought there, he still could not depart from there without shipwreck dry, without slaughter alive, without stain pure, without calamity happy, and with his side covered.

For, to touch only upon those things which concern the exercise of Religion (for regarding Erudition, what a bella bulla beautiful bubble/empty show might be compared among them, perhaps there will be another time for speaking), everything they do and attempt aims at, tends toward, and strives for this: that students might cunningly defect from their Religion, which they received pure and sincere from their parents, and not just go, but rush into the camp of the Papists, and with exultation and joy be led down from the Lutheran Egypt (for thus they speak) to that land of Canaan and the blessed bosom of the Apostolic Catholic Church (if it pleases GOD). This is Rhodes; here they dance. And how could they do otherwise? For this sect of Jesuits was instituted for this end by Pope Paul III himself in the year one thousand five hundred and forty, and afterward, in the year forty-three, was immensely increased regarding the number of professors, and specifically enriched and endowed with many privileges. This was because Martin Luther, that fugitive monk (for this is what their leader Ignatius Loyola pretended), had brought into the light a certain new and clearly monstrous kind of doctrine, most pernicious to the Pope and the Apostolic see, and had seduced many with it. And truly, the monks and other clergy were partly...