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 that spring from instinct.

Again, all who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply
of the world and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same