that a man who has received a benefit with good-will has returned the
favour, yet we leave him in debt nevertheless--bound to repay it even
though he has repaid it. This is not to disown benefits, but is an
encouragement to us neither to fear to receive benefits, nor to faint
under the too great burden of them. "Good things have been given to me;
I have been preserved from starving; I have been saved from the misery
of abject poverty; my life, and what is dearer than life, my liberty,
has been preserved. How shall I be able to repay these favours? When
will the day come upon which I can prove my gratitude to him?" When a
man speaks thus, the day has already come. Receive a benefit, embrace
it, rejoice, not that you have received it, but that you have to owe it
and return it; then you will never be in peril of the great sin of being
rendered ungrateful by mischance. I will not enumerate any difficulties
to you, lest you should despair, and faint at the prospect of a long and
laborious servitude. I do not refer you to the future; do it with what
means you have at hand. You never will be grateful unless you are so
straightway. What, then, will you do? You need not take up arms, yet
perhaps you may have to do so; you need not cross the seas, yet it may
be that you will pay your debt, even when the wind threatens to blow a
gale. Do you wish to return the benefit? Then receive it graciously;
you have then returned the favour--not, indeed, so that you can think
yourself to have repaid it, but so that you can owe it with a quieter
conscience.

BOOK III.

I.

Not to return gratitude for benefits, my AEbutius Liberalis, is
both base in itself, and is thought base by all men; wherefore even
ungrateful men complain of ingratitude, and yet what all condemn is at
the same time rooted in all; and so far do men sometimes run into the
other extreme that some of them become our bitterest enemies, not merely
after receiving benefits from us, but because they have received them.
I cannot deny that some do this out of sheer badness of nature; but
more do so because lapse of time destroys their remembrance, for time
gradually effaces what they felt vividly at the moment. I remember
having had an argument with you about this class of persons, whom you
wished to call forgetful rather than ungrateful, as if that which caused
a man to be ungrateful was any excuse for his being so, or as if the
fact of this happening to a man prevent