Solemn Orations in Praise of the Divine Elector Princes of Saxony, Maurice and Christian I

ORATION I.

fact itself. Therefore, being raised to the helm of affairs, he wished his care for establishing necessary schools to be the first, since he was certainly persuaded that the Church and the Republic could not stand safe without Schools. Auditors, I ask you to weigh with me a little more deeply how illustrious, how conducive to the Church and the Republic, and how laudable that act of Elector Maurice is.

In principle, because he dissipated the colleges of slothful Monk-drones, because he prohibited impious cults, such as the spectacle of the Mass, the source of every evil, the adoration of the Divine Virgin and other saints, and manifold tortures of consciences, because he did not drag back the Monastic revenues to profane uses, did he not by that very act make himself most worthy of a Christian Prince? For those temples, which echoed with the unrefined roaring of the monks, those chambers, those abodes, in which the brothers of ignorance flowed with leisure, luxury, and pleasures, and rather raved in impure celibacy than lived, he constituted as firmaments of piety, receptacles of letters, and homes of the Muses. How easy it would have been for Lord Maurice to convert those monastic revenues to the splendor of the Court, or to the fortification of the region, or to wars, which were then spreading everywhere, for the sake of princely authority? But true piety toward God stood in the way of his doing so, the tranquil state of keeping a safe conscience recalled him, and the health and security of the Church of Christ cried out. Would that, would that all Princes, Counts, Nobles everywhere in the fields, and Magistrates in cities and towns, might carry a Maurician spirit, separate the sacred from the profane, allow revenues once consecrated to the Churches and schools to remain ecclesiastical and scholastic, not draw them into their own treasuries, or convert them to any other profane uses: how much more flourishing