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

...which I am certainly persuaded you all who are present, who desire the Church and the Republic to be safe and flourishing, wish and pray for with me. All these things pertain to the greatness of the praises of Lord Maurice, who loved schools and the teachers and students within them so intensely that he allocated truly magnificent expenses for their sustenance.

Furthermore, think, auditors, how many parents in various towns of Meissen, Thuringia, and Saxony have been freed from great cares, difficulties, and expenses by the Maurician munificence. For he not only founded those schools, but also established them so that boys and adolescents might be fed in them for free. By this act, he not only stirred the talents of many toward industry, but also increased and preserved the private wealth of parents. He affected them with a double and indeed significant and memorable benefit: one, that he lured their sons to studies by his own beneficence; the other, that he enriched them with those very funds that would have been spent on the education of their sons. For how few would have pursued studies, pulled away both by childish rashness and imprudence, by which youth is snatched toward leisure rather than the labors of learning, and held back by the avarice and tenacity of parents, especially when this century is carried with full force, by I know not what miserable and dangerous fate, toward scraping together money and toward lucrative arts. How few parents today read the most serious arguments proposed by Luther in Volumes 2, 5, and 7 of the Jena edition, by which they are warned both to explore the talents of their sons and to weigh the extreme necessity of schools. It is not, therefore, a wonder if few even think about the dignity, excellence, and utility of schools.

Many are deterred by the labors of studies, which are certainly not small and must be continued for so many years; poverty calls others back, which it is the mark of a great and noble soul to endure in literature; many are stirred by the all too frequent contempt for studies to follow another way of life. For letters are proudly scorned, and their cultivators are scorned not only by uneducated Centaurs but also by those who, once progressed from schools, have been elevated to the helms of affairs, who, if they wished, could adorn and aid the studies of teachers and students without any annoyance at all. Hence many parents who have sons sufficiently suited for studies think to themselves: If nothing but perpetual labor, nothing but poverty, nothing but hatred and contempt is to be expected for my son, why should I want him to follow studies rather than another way of life more suited for collecting wealth and avoiding hatred? But those men do not rightly consider the sanctity of the scholastic life; they do not feel its joy, and they do not see the use it provides to others. For indeed, what is holier, what more joyful than the scholastic life? What is more similar to the angelic hosts praising God in heaven? What preserves the Church and the Republic more than schools? In schools, piety still dwells; here dwell Truth and Justice, without which neither Christian nor human life can persist. What is it that stirs and confirms piety and religion in the minds of men? Schools. What explains, teaches, and preserves truth in divine and human letters? Schools again. What shows the norm of Justice, what unfolds the power of divine and human laws alike and instills them in minds? Schools do all these things. The interpreter of Catechetical doctrine and sacred letters disseminates heavenly piety and truth among his auditors. Every professor in his own art demonstrates the truth of human disciplines: the physician [teaches] medicine, the moralist morality, the physicist physics, the mathematician mathematics, and so on for the rest. That justice is in schools, and that it proceeds from schools into the forum and the public society of men...