Wherein this is very worthy of consideration, that the Emperor Julian made use of the same receipt of liberty of conscience to inflame the civil dissensions that our kings do to extinguish them.  So that a man may say on one side, that to give the people the reins to entertain every man his own opinion, is to scatter and sow division, and, as it were, to lend a hand to augment it, there being no legal impediment or restraint to stop or hinder their career; but, on the other side, a man may also say, that to give the people the reins to entertain every man his own opinion, is to mollify and appease them by facility and toleration, and to dull the point which is whetted and made sharper by singularity, novelty, and difficulty:  and I think it is better for the honour of the devotion of our kings, that not having been able to do what they would, they have made a show of being willing to do what they could.

CHAPTER XX

THAT WE TASTE NOTHING PURE

The feebleness of our condition is such that things cannot, in their natural simplicity and purity, fall into our use; the elements that we enjoy are changed, and so ’tis with metals; and gold must be debased with some other matter to fit it for our service.  Neither has virtue, so simple as that which Aristo, Pyrrho, and also the Stoics, made the end of life; nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture useful to it.  Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience: 

                         “Medio de fonte leporum,
          Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis fioribus angat.”

     ["From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is
     bitter, which even in flowers destroys.”—­Lucretius, iv. 1130.]

Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it; would you not say that it is dying of pain?  Nay, when we frame the image of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness, ‘morbidezza’:  a great testimony of their consanguinity and consubstantiality.  The most profound joy has more of severity than gaiety, in it.  The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the grave than of the merry: 

“Ipsa felicitas, se nisi temperat, premit.”

          ["Even felicity, unless it moderate itself, oppresses?”
          —­Seneca, Ep. 74.]

Pleasure chews and grinds us; according to the old Greek verse, which says that the gods sell us all the goods they give us; that is to say, that they give us nothing pure and perfect, and that we do not purchase but at the price of some evil.