That lucrative practice of positive law, designed for the
dispensation of earthly things, the more useful it is found by
the children of this world, so much the less does it aid the
children of light in comprehending the mysteries of holy writ and
the secret sacraments of the faith, seeing that it disposes us
peculiarly to the friendship of the world, by which man, as S.
James testifies, is made the enemy of God. Law indeed encourages
rather than extinguishes the contentions of mankind, which are
the result of unbounded greed, by complicated laws, which can be
turned either way; though we know that it was created by
jurisconsults and pious princes for the purpose of assuaging
these contentions. But in truth, as the same science deals with
contraries, and the power of reason can be used to opposite ends,
and at the same the human mind is more inclined to evil, it
happens with the practisers of this science that they usually
devote themselves to promoting contention rather than peace, and
instead of quoting laws according to the intent of the
legislator, violently strain the language thereof to effect their
own purposes.

Wherefore, although the over-mastering love of books has
possessed our mind from boyhood, and to rejoice in their delights
has been our only pleasure, yet the appetite for the books of the
civil law took less hold of our affections, and we have spent but
little labour and expense in acquiring volumes of this kind. For
they are useful only as the scorpion in treacle, as Aristotle,
the sun of science, has said of logic in his book De Pomo. We
have noticed a certain manifest difference of nature between law
and science, in that every science is delighted and desires to