by the Pons Asinorum, as by a lofty and precipitous rock, which no help of ladders could enable them to scale! This is a hard saying, they exclaim, and who can receive it. The child of inconstancy, who ended by wishing to be transformed into an ass, would perhaps never have given up the study of philosophy, if he had met him in friendly guise veiled under the cloak of pleasure; but anon, astonished by Crato's chair and struck dumb by his endless questions, as by a sudden thunderbolt, he saw no refuge but in flight.
So much we have alleged in defence of the poets; and now we proceed to show that those who study them with proper intent are not to be condemned in regard to them. For our ignorance of one single word prevents the understanding of a whole long sentence, as was assumed in the previous chapter. As now the sayings of the saints frequently allude to the inventions of the poets, it must needs happen that through our not knowing the poem referred to, the whole meaning of the author is completely obscured, and assuredly, as Cassiodorus says in his book Of the Institutes of Sacred Literature: Those things are not to be considered trifles without which great things cannot come to pass. It follows therefore that
