CHAPTER V

OF CONSCIENCE

The Sieur de la Brousse, my brother, and I, travelling one day together during the time of our civil wars, met a gentleman of good sort.  He was of the contrary party, though I did not know so much, for he pretended otherwise:  and the mischief on’t is, that in this sort of war the cards are so shuffled, your enemy not being distinguished from yourself by any apparent mark either of language or habit, and being nourished under the same law, air, and manners, it is very hard to avoid disorder and confusion.  This made me afraid myself of meeting any of our troops in a place where I was not known, that I might not be in fear to tell my name, and peradventure of something worse; as it had befallen me before, where, by such a mistake, I lost both men and horses, and amongst others an Italian gentleman my page, whom I bred with the greatest care and affection, was miserably slain, in whom a youth of great promise and expectation was extinguished.  But the gentleman my brother and I met had so desperate, half-dead a fear upon him at meeting with any horse, or passing by any of the towns that held for the King, that I at last discovered it to be alarms of conscience.  It seemed to the poor man as if through his visor and the crosses upon his cassock, one would have penetrated into his bosom and read the most secret intentions of his heart; so wonderful is the power of conscience.  It makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves, and for want of other witnesses, to give evidence against ourselves: 

“Occultum quatiens animo tortore flagellum.”

     ["The torturer of the soul brandishing a sharp scourge within.” 
     —­Juvenal, iii. 195.]

This story is in every child’s mouth:  Bessus the Paeonian, being reproached for wantonly pulling down a nest of young sparrows and killing them, replied, that he had reason to do so, seeing that those little birds never ceased falsely to accuse him of the murder of his father.  This parricide had till then been concealed and unknown, but the revenging fury of conscience caused it to be discovered by him himself, who was to suffer for it.  Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same time with it.  Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever has deserved it expects it.  Wickedness contrives torments against itself: 

“Malum consilium consultori pessimum.”

               ["Ill designs are worst to the contriver.” 
               —­Apud Aul.  Gellium, iv. 5.]

as the wasp stings and hurts another, but most of all itself, for it there loses its sting and its use for ever,

“Vitasque in vulnere ponunt.”

["And leave their own lives in the wound.” 
—­Virgil, Geo., iv. 238.]

Cantharides have somewhere about them, by a contrariety of nature, a counterpoison against their poison.  In like manner, at the same time that men take delight in vice, there springs in the conscience a displeasure that afflicts us sleeping and waking with various tormenting imaginations: