D E D I C A T O R Y.

...state, there were no lack of provocations for Your severity, nor seeds of Civil unrest, and bitter irritations of minds encountered everywhere; yet, by the rule original: amussi; literally a mason's rule or level, used here as a metaphor for the precise and unwavering standard of justice. of Your justice—that is, by the provident moderation of Your great Spirit—those things which were wounded, You healed with Your Clemency rather than cutting them away. You, who by even overlooking faults and not anxiously inquiring into everything, preferred to seem to have found good men rather than to have made them; to be loved rather than to be feared. These are the powerful trumpet-calls of virtue with which You fill the World, and with which, through the admirable sublimity of Your Mind, You resonate an Echo original: Echonem; Kircher uses a popular Baroque literary device here called an "echo poem," where each subsequent word is formed by dropping the first letter of the previous word, creating a linguistic "fading" effect. unto Your Subjects: