PREFACE

...and it is a pleasure to mention one who illuminates France with rare piety. He adorns our nation. With this incomparable work, he brings our language to the highest dignity and leads it toward a sanctified state. I would consider the inhabitants of Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Poland, and the rest of the world—especially Christians—to be blessed if they took care to translate such a beautiful and useful work into their own languages. Thus, provoked and inflamed by a holy competition, they might enjoy the knowledge of the blessed.

XIII. I would like to advise the heralds of the divine word This refers to preachers and theologians.. Those who wish to decorate their sermons or other parts with new introductions or unheard of, yet beautiful and useful, moral metaphors The original term "tropologia" refers to the figurative or moral interpretation of scripture or nature., comparisons, and parallels will find many things in this and the preceding volume that they can apply to human conduct. For instance, what is easier than to draw lessons for both faith and virtue from the 29 theorems on light, or the 30 on shadows, found in the first book of Optics?

You could hardly understand any proposition from the vast number of theorems in the seven books of Optics that does not generate a specific thought about morals and serve to decorate a sermon.

The same must be said about the propositions of Mechanics. This is especially true for those contained in the first and fourth parts of Book 1, and all of Book 2. The second and third parts of that book are more difficult. The third book will be very easily applied to piety by everyone, if they only wish it. I would provide six hundred examples of this if the rules of a brief summary Latin: Synopsis. permitted it.

Add to this that things discovered by one's own study are more pleasing to each person. Things suggested by another and published become common to all. They are either neglected by many, or if someone uses them, he fears another might have turned the same things to his own use. Then he might be said to have borrowed from that person or to have coincided with him. Men are usually tickled by a desire for glory. They want listeners to believe that what they say was found by them first. In this way, they might hold greater authority, as if they were superior in talent or outstanding in piety. Only the charity of God can extinguish or calm this desire for glory and fame. The herald of the divine word must establish and order this charity within himself. He must seek nothing except the glory of God and the eternal salvation of his listeners.

XIV. I bring an end to this Preface. I advise those learned men who have meditated on and found specific reasons for the confirmation of our faith. They will achieve great praise and reap greater utility if they support their treatises with such solid reasons that the impious Those who do not believe or who oppose religious doctrine. are forced to yield to the truth. Therefore on account of...