o
provide excuses for your sin; and then you will confirm the truth of
that saying of Hesiod,--

"'The man that procrastinates struggles ever with ruin.'"

Even so! So early did a heathen moralist learn the solemn fact that
"only this once" ends in "there is no harm in it." Well does Mr.
Coventry Patmore sing:--

"How easy to keep free from sin;
How hard that freedom to recall;
For awful truth it is that men
_Forget_ the heaven from which they fall."

In another place Epictetus warns us, however, not to be too easily
discouraged in our attempts after good;--and, above all, never to
_despair_. "In the schools of the wrestling master, when a boy falls he
is bidden to get up again, and to go on wrestling day by day till he has
acquired strength; and we must do the same, and not be like those poor
wretches who after one failure suffer themselves to be swept along as by
a torrent. You need but _will_" he says, "and it is done; but if you
relax your efforts, you will be ruined; for ruin and recovery are both
from within.--And what will you gain by all this? You will gain modesty
for inpudence, purity for vileness, moderation for drunkenness. If you
think there are any better ends than these, then by all means go on in
sin, for you are beyond the power of any god to save."

But Epictetus is particularly in earnest about warning us that to
_profess_ these principles and _talk_ about them is one thing--to act up
to them quite another. He draws a humorous picture of an inconsistent
and unreal philosopher, who--after eloquently proving that nothing is
good but what pertains to virtue, and nothing evil but what pertains to
vice, and that all other things are indifferent--goes to sea. A storm
comes on, and the masts creak, and the philosopher screams; and an
impertinent person stands by and asks in surprise, "Is it then _vice_ to
suffer shipwreck? because, if not, it can be no evil;" a question which
makes our philosopher so angry that he is inclined to fling a log at his
interlocutor's head. But Epictetus sternly tells him that the
philosopher never was one at all, except in name; that as he sat in the
schools puffed up by homage and adulation, his innate cowardice and
conceit were but hidden under borrowed plumes; and that in him the name
of Stoic was usurped.

"Why," he asks in another passage, "why do you call yourself a Stoic?
Why do you deceive the multitude? Why do you act the Jew when