being straightway moved by your tears gave you the breast of
grammar to suck, which ye plied continually with teeth and
tongue, until ye lost your native barbarousness and learned to
speak with our tongues the mighty things of God. And next we
clad you with the goodly garments of philosophy, rhetoric and
dialectic, of which we had and have a store, while ye were naked
as a tablet to be painted on. For all the household of
philosophy are clothed with garments, that the nakedness and
rawness of the intellect may be covered. After this, providing
you with the fourfold wings of the quadrivials that ye might be
winged like the seraphs and so mount above the cherubim, we sent
you to a friend at whose door, if only ye importunately knocked,
ye might borrow the three loaves of the Knowledge of the Trinity,
in which consists the final felicity of every sojourner below.
Nay, if ye deny that ye had these privileges, we boldly declare
that ye either lost them by your carelessness, or that through
your sloth ye spurned them when offered to you. If these things
seem but a light matter to you, we will add yet greater things.
Ye are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy race, ye are a
peculiar people chosen into the lot of God, ye are priests and
ministers of God, nay, ye are called the very Church of God, as
though the laity were not to be called churchmen. Ye, being
preferred to the laity, sing psalms and hymns in the chancel,
and, serving the altar and living by the altar, make the true
body of Christ, wherein God Himself has honoured you not only
above the laity, but even a little higher than the angels. For
to whom of His angels has He said at any time: Thou art a priest
for ever after the order of Melchisedech? Ye dispense the
patrimony of the crucified one to the poor, wherein it is
required of stewards that a man be found faithful. Ye are