So what then, my dearest friends, if these things are now crystal-clear? It wasn't to cheat us, but to give us some innocent fun that they were first locked up in obscurity. They wouldn't be grasped, you see, with such pleasure, if they were rendered cheap by being laid out in the open.
Quid ergo, carissimi, si patent haec? Non ad fraudem, sed ad iucunditatem clausa erant. Neque enim tam dulciter caperentur, si prompta vilescerent.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Obscurity of Scripture
Augustine, Sermons 352.6 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 39, col. 1555; tr. Edmund Hill):