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

devoted to the belly and sloth, partly by nature dull and slow, by art naked and unarmed, and by practice unprepared and unskilled, so that they could less oppose, let alone resist, this new Teacher. Therefore, new ones were to be produced from all corners of the earth—with the Spaniard as the standard-bearer—Hercules, for whom it might be a game to crush and confound these Lutheran Achelous figures or Hydras of Wittenberg, and to serve them up to the whole world to be mocked, or to condemn them to the cross, the sword, or the flames, or at least, stripped of all their goods, to banish them where they might not even hear the name of the Pelopidae a cursed lineage. New Aesculapiuses were to be summoned, who might collect the scattered ruins of the Catholic Church—like the dissected limbs of Hippolytus—heal them with a present remedy, and restore them to their former dignity or divinity. These are the principles of that society—beautiful indeed, if we wished to prepare asylums for our children among those companions. Added to this is that they bind themselves by a peculiar and special vow beyond that common bond: that whatever the modern and other Roman Popes existing for the time being might command, pertaining to the perfect propagation of souls and faith, and to whatever provinces they wish to send them, they are bound to execute immediately, as much as lies in them, without any hesitation or excuse, whether they send them to the Turks, or to any other infidels (even in those parts which they call the Indies), or to any heretics, or schismatics, or even to any believers. These words exist in the formula of the vow first approved and confirmed by Paul III and afterward by Julius III. Alas, may this cough be cursed! They wish to obey the Pope in all things, they wish to approach all heretics if he commands it, and either lead them to the straight and royal road (as it indeed seems to them), or devote them to all the Furies—and not to Purgatory or the Limbo of the Fathers (for these Lutherans are not worthy of this), but to cast and thrust them into the very last depths of Tartarus. But the Pope has nothing more in his vows than that the Lutheran religion be utterly extirpated, the books of our people be consumed by fire, and the Electors...