Whether 'Twere Rightly Said, Live Concealed. (4)

But if indeed, in the state of life we are under, you will needs seclude us from all knowledge and acquaintance with the world (as men shut light from their entertainments and drinking-bouts, for which they set the night apart), let

it be only such who make it the whole business of life to heap pleasure upon pleasure; let such live recluses all their days. Were I, in truth, to wanton away my days in the arms of your miss Hedeia, or spend them with Leontium, another dear of yours,—were I to bid defiance to virtue, or to place all that’s good in the gratification of the flesh or the ticklings of a sensual pleasure,—these accursed actions and rites would need darkness and an eternal night to veil them; and may they ever be doomed to oblivion and obscurity. But what should they hide their heads for, who with regard to the works of nature own and magnify a God, who celebrate his justice and providence, who in point of morality are due observers of the law, promoters of society and community among all men, and lovers of the public-weal, and who in the administration thereof prefer the common good before private advantage? Why should such men cloister up themselves, and live recluses from the world? For would you have them out of the way, for fear they should set a good example, and allure others to virtue out of emulation of the precedent? If Themistocles’s valor had been unknown at Athens, Greece had never given Xerxes that repulse. Had not Camillus shown himself in defence of the Romans, their city Rome had no longer stood. Sicily had not recovered her liberty, had Plato been a stranger to Dion. Truly (in my mind) to be known to the world under some eminent character not only carries a reputation with it, but makes the virtues in us become practical like light, which renders us not only visible but useful to others. Epaminondas, during the first forty years of his life, in which no notice was taken of him, was an useless citizen to Thebes; but afterwards, when he had once gained credit and the government amongst the Thebans, he both rescued them from present destruction, and freed even Greece herself from imminent slavery, exhibiting (like light, which is in its own nature glorious, and to others beneficial at the same time) a valor seasonably active and serviceable to his country, yet interwoven with his own laurels. For

Virtue, like finest brass, by use grows bright.[*]

And not our houses alone, when (as Sophocles has it) they stand long untenanted, run the faster to ruin; but men’s natural parts, lying unemployed for lack of acquaintance with the world, contract a kind of filth or rust and craziness thereby. For sottish ease, and a life wholly sedentary and given up to idleness, spoil and debilitate not only the body but the soul too. And as close waters shadowed over by bordering trees, and stagnated in default of springs to supply current and motion to them, become foul and corrupt; so, methinks, is it with the innate faculties of a dull unstirring soul,—whatever usefulness, whatever seeds of good she may have latent in her, yet when she puts not these powers into action, when once they stagnate, they lose their vigor and run to decay.