wrong or disorderly
action on the part of some of his farm labourers, knowing that at the
time he was in a very great rage and highly incensed at them, did
nothing to them, but merely departed, saying, "You may thank your stars
that I am in a rage with you." If then the remembrance of the words and
recorded acts of men abates the fierceness and intensity of our rage,
much more likely is it that we (observing that the deity, though without
either fear or repentance in any case, yet puts off his punishments and
defers them for some time) shall be reserved in our views about such
matters, and shall think that mildness and long-suffering which the god
exhibits a divine part of virtue, reforming a few by speedy punishment,
but benefiting and correcting many by a tardy one.

Sec. VI. Let us consider in the second place that punishments inflicted by
men for offences regard only retaliation, and, when the offender is
punished, stop and go no further; so that they seem to follow offences
yelping at them like a dog, and closely pursuing at their heels as it
were. But it is likely that the deity would look at the state of any
guilty soul that he intended to punish, if haply it might turn and
repent, and would give[820] time for reformation to all whose vice was
not absolute and incurable. For knowing how great a share of virtue
souls come into the world with, deriving it from him, and how strong and
lasting is their nobility of nature, and how it breaks out into vice
against its natural disposition through the corruption of bad habits and
companions, and afterwards in some cases reforms itself, and recovers
its proper position, he does not inflict punishment on all persons
alike; but the incorrigible he at once removes from life and cuts off,
since it is altogether injurious to others, but most of all to a man's
own self, to live in perpetual vice, whereas to those who seem to have
fallen into wrong-doing, rather from ignorance of what was good than
from deliberate choice of what was bad, he gives time to repent. But if
they persist in vice he punishes them too, for he has no fear that they
will escape him. Consider also how many changes take place in the life
and character of men, so that the Greeks give the names [Greek: tropos]
and [Greek: ethos] to the character, the first word meaning _change_,
and the latter the immense force and power of _habit_. I think also that
the ancients called Cecrops half man and half dragon[821] not