As for the services of knowledge to private virtue, it takes away all levity, temerity, and insolence by copious suggestion of all doubts and difficulties, and acquainting the mind to balance reasons on both sides.  It takes away vain admiration of anything, which is the root of all weakness.  No man can marvel at the play of puppets that goes behind the curtain.  And certainly, if a man meditate much upon the universal frame of Nature, the earth with men upon it (the divineness of souls except) will not seem much other than an ant-hill, where some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust.  But especially learning disposes the mind to be capable of growth and reformation.  For the unlearned man knows not what it is to descend into himself or to call himself to account, nor the pleasure of feeling himself each day a better man than he was the day before; he is like an ill mower, that mows on still and never whets his scythe.  Knowledge crowns man’s nature with power.  It even gives fortune to particular persons; and it is hard to say whether arms or learning have advanced greater numbers.  As for the pleasure and delight thereof, in knowledge there is no satiety.  “It is a pleasure incomparable,” says Lucretius, “for the mind of man to be settled, landed, and fortified in the certainty of truth; and from thence to descry the errors and perturbations of other men.”

Lastly, by learning man excels man in that wherein man excels beasts.  The great dignity of knowledge lies in immortality or continuance, and the monuments of learning are more durable than the monuments of power.  Have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter, during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished?

If the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carries riches and commodities from place to place, and consociates the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified?  Popular and mistaken judgments will continue as they have ever been, but so will that also continue whereupon learning has ever relied, and which fails not.

“Wisdom is justified of her children.”

SECOND BOOK

The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of man’s understanding—­history to his memory, poetry to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason.  Divine learning receives the same distribution, so that theology consisteth of history of the Church; of parables, which are divine poetry; and of holy doctrine or precept.  For prophecy is but divine history, in which the narrative is before the fact.