ther of life or of
name.

_VI.--Opinion in Good and Evil_

Men, saith an ancient Greek, are tormented by the opinion they have of
things, and not by things themselves. It were a great conquest of our
miserable human condition if any man could establish everywhere this
true proposition. For if evils lie only in our judgment, it is in our
power to condemn them or to turn them to good.

In death, what we principally fear is pain; as also poverty has nothing
to be feared for but what she casts upon us through hunger, thirst,
cold, and other miseries. I will willingly grant that pain is the worst
accident of our being; I hate and shun it as much as possible. But it is
in our power, if not to annul, at least to diminish it, with patience,
and though the body should be moved, yet to keep mind and reason in good
temper.

If it were not so, what has brought virtue, valour, magnanimity,
fortitude, into credit? If a man is not to lie on the hard ground, to
endure the heat of the scorching sun, to feed hungrily on a horse or an
ass, to see himself mangled and cut in pieces, to have a bullet plucked
out of his bones, to suffer incisions, his flesh to be stitched up,
cauterised, and searched--all incident to a martial man--how shall we
purchase the advantage and pre-eminence we so greedily seek over the
vulgar sort?

Moreover, this ought to comfort us, that naturally, if pain be violent
it is also short; if long, it is easier. Thou shall not feel it
over-long; if thou feel it over-much, it will either end itself or end
thee. Even as an enemy becomes more furious when we fly from him, so
does pain grow prouder if we tremble under it. It will stoop and yield
on better terms to him who makes head against it. In recoiling we draw
on the enemy. As the body is steadier and stronger to a charge if it
stand stiffly, so is the soul.

Weak-backed men, such as I am, feel a dash of a barber's razor more than
ten blows with a sword in the heat of fight. The painful throes of
childbearing, deemed by physicians and the word of God to be very great,
some nations make no account of. I omit to speak of the Lacedaemonian
women; come we to the Switzers of our infantry. Trudging and trotting
after their husbands, to-day you see them carry the child around their
neck which but yesterday they brought into the world.

How many examples have we not of contempt of pain and smart by that sex!
What can they not do, what will they not do, what fear th