wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they
overcome us. And indeed the Christians were put so to their shifts by
this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance,
that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the
seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers
forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new
Christian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the providence of
God provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his son, by
taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So
great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning;
and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the
Church, than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian.

And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil whipped St.
Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or else it was a phantasm
bred by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his
discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms,
and had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly
partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril
Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading, not long before; next
to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in
those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of such a tutoring
apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made
of Margites, a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not
then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a vision
recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerome, to the
nun Eustochium, and, besides, has nothing of a fever in it. Dionysius
Alexandrinus was about the year 240 a person of great name in the Church