§ 65: For seven hundred years, they have occupied human reason more than all other books, have illuminated it more than all other books, even if only through the light that human reason itself brought into them.
§ 66: It would have been impossible for any other book to become so generally known among such different peoples: and indisputably, the fact that such diverse modes of thought have occupied themselves with this same book has done more to advance human understanding than if each people had had its very own primer.
§ 67: It was also highly necessary that each people should consider this book for a time as the non plus ultra of its knowledge. For that is also how a boy must regard his primer at the start, lest his impatience to be done with it should hurry him on to things for which he has not yet laid the foundation.
§ 68: Another thing which is of the greatest importance at this point – Beware, you more able individual who stamp and fret on the last page of this primer, take care not to let your weaker classmates notice what you sense or already begin to see!
§ 69: Until these weaker fellow pupils have caught up with you, better return once more to this primer, and examine whether that which you consider mere procedural methods or didactic expedients, is not really something more.
§ 70: In the infancy of the human race, on the example of the doctrine of God's unity, you have seen that God reveals even mere rational truths immediately; or permitted and caused mere rational truths to be taught as immediately revealed truths for some time in order to disseminate them the more rapidly and establish them more firmly.
§ 71: In the boyhood of the human race you find the same in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It is preached in the second, better primer as a revelation, not taught as a result of human reason.
§ 72: Just as we can henceforth dispense with the Old Testament in the doctrine of the unity of God, and just as we are beginning to dispense, by degrees, with the New Testament, in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, might there not also be other similar truths foreshadowed in this book, [truths] which we are to marvel at, as revelations, until the time comes when human reason has learned to deduce them from other demonstrated truths and bind them with them?
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