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

Princes, Counts, Barons, Nobles, and all cities infected and defiled by this plague and stain be stripped of all honors, spoiled of all goods, and exposed to the looting of all by the public ban and proscription. We have now, therefore, what we want: namely, that by nature they were made for this, by first intention instituted for this, bound by a singular vow, confirmed by a very large bull from the Pope, armed with unbridled audacity and practice, and finally, clearly blinded by the impunity of their crimes, so that they might seize, crush, prostrate, and utterly destroy the Lutherans. The Pope and these companions are neither ashamed, sorry, nor repentant of this their institution and purpose. But they confess the same daily in public writings and express it openly in the very act, and like Sorices field mice, they betray themselves regarding what they carry under their cloaks—as if they were doing a good thing and performing a work worthy of heaven itself—so that there is no need to return to the Ovidian pipes to learn what the ears of Midas are, or rather what a tyrannical and stupid heart is. For thus, recently, the Pope in a Bull publicly affixed in Rome devoted to all Furies everyone who does not depend on his nod, nor lick his saliva, and cast them out from the bosom of the Church like rotten and putrid members. I will recite the words, or rather the lightning bolts—blunt on our hearths, indeed, but in not a few places, more than Vulcanian: "We excommunicate and anathematize," he says, "on behalf of Almighty God and ourselves, all Hussites, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Huguenots, and their believers, their own harborers or supporters, and generally any defenders of them, and those reading their books without our authority, and those who obstinately withdraw or recede from our obedience." Thus the Pope. Jacob Crusius, a Jesuit, publicly teaches: "The father of his society ought to have been a soldier." Because, as it is the duty of a soldier to rush upon the enemy with all his strength until he emerges victorious, "so it is our duty," he says, "to rush upon ALL who resist the Roman Pope, and to remove and abolish them by counsels, speeches, and writings, having also invoked the secular arm—that is, by fire and sword."