and the Unmoved Mover of infinite virtue, and may immerse itself
in love without end. See how with the aid of books we attain the
reward of our beatitude, while we are yet sojourners below.

Why need we say more? Certes, just as we have learnt on the
authority of Seneca, leisure without letters is death and the
sepulture of the living, so contrariwise we conclude that
occupation with letters or books is the life of man.

Again, by means of books we communicate to friends as well as
foes what we cannot safely entrust to messengers; since the book
is generally allowed access to the chambers of princes, from
which the voice of its author would be rigidly excluded, as
Tertullian observes at the beginning of his Apologeticus. When
shut up in prison and in bonds, and utterly deprived of bodily
liberty, we use books as ambassadors to our friends, and entrust
them with the conduct of our cause, and send them where to go
ourselves would incur the penalty of death. By the aid of books
we remember things that are past, and even prophesy as to the
future; and things present, which shift and flow, we perpetuate
by committing them to writing.

The felicitous studiousness and the studious felicity of the
all-powerful eunuch, of whom we are told in the Acts, who had
been so mightily kindled by the love of the prophetic writings
that he ceased not from his reading by reason of his journey, had
banished all thought of the populous palace of Queen Candace, and
had forgotten even the treasures of which he was the keeper, and
had neglected alike his journey and the chariot in which he rode.
Love of his book alone had wholly engrossed this domicile of