ed for
certain and true throughout. For if evils have no admission into us but
by the judgment we ourselves make of them, it should seem that it is,
then, in our own power to despise them or to turn them to good. If
things surrender themselves to our mercy, why do we not convert and
accommodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil and torment is
neither evil nor torment of itself, but only that our fancy gives it that
quality, it is in us to change it, and it being in our own choice, if
there be no constraint upon us, we must certainly be very strange fools
to take arms for that side which is most offensive to us, and to give
sickness, want, and contempt a bitter and nauseous taste, if it be in our
power to give them a pleasant relish, and if, fortune simply providing
the matter, 'tis for us to give it the form. Now, that what we call evil
is not so of itself, or at least to that degree that we make it, and that
it depends upon us to give it another taste and complexion (for all comes
to one), let us examine how that can be maintained.

If the original being of those things we fear had power to lodge itself
in us by its own authority, it would then lodge itself alike, and in like
manner, in all; for men are all of the same kind, and saving in greater
and less proportions, are all provided with the same utensils and
instruments to conceive and to judge; but the diversity of opinions we
have of those things clearly evidences that they only enter us by
composition; one person, peradventure, admits them in their true being,
but a thousand others give them a new and contrary being in them. We
hold death, poverty, and pain for our principal enemies; now, this death,
which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not
know that others call it the only secure harbour from the storms and
tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of
liberty, and the common and prompt remedy of all evils? And as the one
expect it with fear and trembling, the others support it with greater
ease than life. That one complains of its facility:

"Mors! utinam pavidos vitae subducere nolles.
Sed virtus to sola daret!"

["O death! wouldst that thou might spare the coward, but that
valour alone should pay thee tribute."--Lucan, iv. 580.]

Now, let us leave these boastful courages. Theodorus answered
Lysimachus, who threatened to kill him, "Thou wilt do a brave feat