Academic Exercise on the Abstinence of the Early Christians from Reading Profane Books

osophy and their waters be unskillfully mixed and confounded; since every discipline, separated by its own boundaries, ought to possess its own internal principles. For it is well known how many and how great portents of opinions—not to say monsters—the preposterous and confused Philosophy of the Scholastics has brought forth, which, in the judgment of Verulam, brought it about that the pugnacious and thorny Philosophy of Aristotle was mingled more than is proper with the body of religion. k)

Th. XIII.

What then? Are profane books to be rejected because the Fathers and many others seem to have so judged? We consider that a garden should not be so weeded that all plants are torn out by the roots. We admit, indeed, that the ancients noted various errors in the philosophers that were hostile to Christian truth; but we also contend that they did not deny that a great deal of good and fruit is contained in them—

k) In the Novum Organum.