tues; and will certainly form habits of self-government, and of denying our inclinations, whenever veracity, justice or charity requires it. Nor is there any foundation for this great nicety, with which some affect to distinguish in this case, in order to depreciate all religion proceeding from hope or fear. For veracity, justice and charity, regard to God's authority and to our own chief interest, are not only all three coincident; but each of them is in itself a just and natural motive or principle of action. And he who begins a good life from any one of them and perseveres in it, as he is already in some degree, so he cannot fail of becoming more and more, of that character which is correspondent to the constitution of nature as moral, and to the relation which God stands in to us as moral Governor of it: nor consequently can he fail of obtaining that happiness which this constitution and relation necessarily suppose connected with that character. J. BUTLER 193. Nor are you happier in the relating or the moralizing your fable. The frogs' (being once a free nation, saith the fable) 'petitioned Jupiter for a king: he tumbled among them a log: they found it insensible; they petitioned then for a king that should be active: he sent them a crane,' (a stork, saith the fable,) which straight fell to pecking them up.' This you apply to the reproof of them who desire change: whereas indeed the true moral shews rather the folly of those who being free seek a king; which for the most part either as a log lies heavy on his subjects, without doing aught worthy of his dignity and the charge to maintain him, or as a stork is ever pecking them up and devouring them. J. MILTON THE FABLE OF THE FROGS-ITS MORAL. 194. LIBERTY OF WRITING AT ATHENS. In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the magistrate cared to take notice of; those either blasphemous and atheistical or libellous. Thus the books of Protagoras were, by the judges of Areopagus, commanded to be burnt and himself banished the territory for a discourse, begun with his confessing not to know 'whether there were gods or whether not.' And against defaming, it was agreed that none should be traduced by name, as was the manner of Vetus Comœdia, whereby we may guess how they censured libelling; and this course was quick enough, as Cicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists and the open way of defaming, as the event shewed. Of other sects and opinions, though tending to voluptuousness, and the denying of divine Providence, they took no heed. Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus or that libertine school of Cyrene or what the Cynic impudence uttered was ever questioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius is commonly known and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom as is reported nightly studied so much the same author. J. MILTON 195. PLATO-HIS EXCLUSION OF POETRY FROM HIS COMMONWEALTH. Plato, a man of high authority indeed, but least of all for his Commonwealth, in the book of his laws, which no city ever yet received, fed his fancy with making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an Academic night-sitting. By which laws he seems to tolerate no kind of learning, but by unalterable decree, consisting most of practical traditions, to the attainment whereof a library of smaller bulk than his own dialogues would be abundant. And there also enacts, that no poet should so much as read to any private man what he had written, until the judges and law-keepers had seen it and allowed it; but that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined, and to no other, is evident. Why was he not else a lawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by his own magistrates, both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy; and also for commending the latter of them, though he were the malicious libeller of his chief friends, to be read by the tyrant Dionysius, who had little need of such trash to spend his time on? But that he knew this licensing of poems had reference and dependence to many other provisoes there FOL. CENT. 28 set down in his fancied republic, which in this world could have no place; and so neither he himself, nor any magistrate or city, ever imitated that course, which, taken apart from those other collateral injunctions, must needs be vain and fruitless. J. MILTON 196. DUE AMOUNT OF RESTRAINT IN LEGAL ENACTMENTS. Impunity and remissness for certain are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the great art lies to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance1 prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy' to be sober just or continent? Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing. He had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience or love or gift, which is of force; God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did He create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin, by removing the matter of sin. For, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left—ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so. Such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point. J. MILTON 1 pittance] i. e. allowance. 2 gramercy] i. e. thanks. 197. THE DANGERS OF AN HONEST MAN IN MUCH COMPANY. If twenty thousand naked Americans were not able to resist the assaults of but twenty well-arm'd Spaniards, I see but little possibility for one honest man to defend himself against twenty thousand knaves, who are all furnished capà-pie, with the defensive arms of worldly prudence and the offensive too of craft and malice. He will find no less odds than this against him, if he have much to do in human affairs. The only advice therefore that I can give him is, to be sure not to venture his person any longer in the open campaign, to retreat and entrench himself, to stop up all avenues and draw up all bridges against so numerous an enemy. The truth of it is, that a man in much business must either make himself a knave, or else the world will make him a fool; and if the injury went no farther than the being laughed at, a wise man would content himself with the revenge of retaliation; but the case is much worse, for these civil cannibals too, as well as the wild ones, not only dance about such a taken stranger but at last devour him. A. COWLEY 198. HISTORY, THE EXEMPLIFICATION OF THE PRECEPTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. All history is only the precepts of moral philosophy reduced into examples. Moral philosophy is divided into two parts, ethics and politics; the first instructs us in our private offices of virtue, the second in those which relate to the management of the commonwealth. Both of these teach by argumentation and reasoning, which rush as it were into the mind and possess with violence; but history rather allures than forces us to virtue. There is nothing of the tyrant in example; but it gently glides into us, is easy and pleasant in its passage, and in one word reduces into practice our speculative notions; therefore the more powerful the examples are, they are the more useful also; and by being more known, they are more powerful. Now unity, which is defined, is in its own nature more apt to be understood than multiplicity, which in some measure participates of infinity. The reason is Aristotle's. J. DRYDEN 199. CONFORMITY TO THE DIVINE NATURE. God alone excepted, who actually and everlastingly is whatsoever He may be, and which cannot hereafter be that which now He is not; all other things besides are somewhat in possibility, which as yet they are not in act. And for this cause there is in all things an appetite or desire, whereby they incline to something which they may be; and when they are it, they shall be perfecter than now they are. All which perfections are contained under the general name of Goodness. And because there is not in the world anything whereby another may not be made the perfecter, therefore all things that are, are good. Again, sith there can be no goodness desired, which proceedeth not from God himself, as from the supreme cause of all things; and every effect doth after a sort contain, at leastwise resemble the cause from which it proceedeth: all things in the world are said in some sort to seek the highest, and to covet more or less the participation of God himself; yet this doth no where so much appear, as it doth in Man, because there are so many kinds of perfection which Man seeketh. R. HOOKER 200. TRUE GREATNESS OF MIND. It is a very melancholy reflection, that men are usually so weak that it is absolutely necessary for them to know sorrow and pain to be in their right senses. Prosperous people (for happy there are none) are hurried away with a fond sense of their present condition, and thoughtless of the mutability of fortune. Fortune is a term which we must use in such discourses as these for what is wrought by the unseen hand of the Disposer of all things. But methinks the disposition of a mind which is truly great is that which makes misfortunes and sorrows little when they befal ourselves, great and lamentable when they befal other men. J. ADDISON 201. THE PERCEPTIONS OF SENSE. The perceptions of sense are gross; but even in the senses there is a difference. Though harmony and proportion are not objects of sense, yet the eye and the ear are organs which offer to the mind such materials, by means whereof she may apprehend both the one and the other. By experiments of sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties of the soul; and from them whether by a gradual evolution or ascent we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to memory. These become subjects for fancy to work upon. Reason considers and judges |