Library of Samuel Teleki: Part One

so that those who have labored with their studies and counsels to throw shackles on intellects and to obscure good letters have always seemed to me to mistrust their own cause. That letters were harmful to the depraved religions and superstitions of the Gentiles, no one would deny; we read 1.) Diog. Laërt. Book II and V. Xenoph. Mem. Socr. I. 2. 31. that Socrates, the chief of philosophers, was condemned to death, and that Philosophers, Rhetoricians, and Mathematicians were ejected from Rome and Athens itself, 2.) Sueton. on famous Rhetoricians, c. I. Gell. N. A. XV. 11. Athen. XIII. 9. because they were instituting a new kind of discipline contrary to the custom and habit of the ancestors. For it was easy to see that once those studies were ignited, the superstitions of auguries and auspices would be abolished, and the religion and ancient discipline leaning upon them could not stand. But who would persuade himself that it is in the interest of a purer religion and piety that the most brilliant image of eternal wisdom in us, or, as Cardinal Bembo loves to speak, the aura of the divine mind, should be deleted by the fogs of ignorance poured upon it, and that men endowed with the cultivation of reason should allow this divine gift, by which