hat books should be as it were an
antidote to all evil, the reading and use of which He has commanded to
be the healthful daily nourishment of the soul, so that by them the
intellect being refreshed and neither weak nor doubtful should never
hesitate in action. This subject is elegantly handled by John of
Salisbury, in his Policraticon. In conclusion, all classes of men who
are conspicuous by the tonsure or the sign of clerkship, against whom
books lifted up their voices in the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters,
are bound to serve books with perpetual veneration.

CHAPTER XV

OF THE ADVANTAGES OF THE LOVE OF BOOKS

It transcends the power of human intellect, however deeply it may have
drunk of the Pegasean fount, to develop fully the title of the present
chapter. Though one should speak with the tongue of men and angels,
though he should become a Mercury or Tully, though he should grow sweet
with the milky eloquence of Livy, yet he will plead the stammering of
Moses, or with Jeremiah will confess that he is but a boy and cannot
speak, or will imitate Echo rebounding from the mountains. For we know
that the love of books is the same thing as the love of wisdom, as was
proved in the second chapter. Now this love is called by the Greek
word philosophy, the whole virtue of which no created intelligence can
comprehend; for she is believed to be the mother of all good things:
Wisdom vii. She as a heavenly dew extinguishes the heats of fleshly
vices, the intense activity of the mental forces relaxing the vigour of
the animal forces, and slothfulness being wholly put to flight, which
being gone all the bows of Cupid are unstrung.

Hence Plato says in the Phaedo: The philosopher is manifest in this,
that he dissevers the soul from communion with the body. Love, says
Jerome, the knowledge of the scriptures, and thou wilt not love the
vices of the flesh. The godlike Xenocrates showed this by the firmness
of his reason, who was declared by the famous hetaera Phryne to be a
statue and not a man, when all her blandishments could not shake his
resolve, as Valerius Maximus relates at length. Our own Origen showed
this also, who chose rather to be unsexed by the mutilation of himself,
than to be made effeminate by the omnipotence of woman--though it was a
hasty remedy, repugnant alike to nature and to virtue, whose place it
is not to make men insensible to passion, but to slay with the dagger
of reason the passions tha