at
is incumbent on them is only to exhort and admonish the people; for the
power of correcting and punishing ill men belongs wholly to the Prince
and to the other magistrates. The severest thing that the priest does,
is the excluding those that are desperately wicked from joining in their
worship. There is not any sort of punishment more dreaded by them than
this, for as it loads them with infamy, so it fills them with secret
horrors, such is their reverence to their religion; nor will their
bodies be long exempted from their share of trouble; for if they do not
very quickly satisfy the priests of the truth of their repentance, they
are seized on by the Senate, and punished for their impiety. The
education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much
care of instructing them in letters as in forming their minds and
manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse very early into
the tender and flexible minds of children such opinions as are both good
in themselves and will be useful to their country. For when deep
impressions of these things are made at that age, they follow men
through the whole course of their lives, and conduce much to preserve
the peace of the government, which suffers by nothing more than by vices
that rise out of ill opinions. The wives of their priests are the most
extraordinary women of the whole country; sometimes the women themselves
are made priests, though that falls out but seldom, nor are any but
ancient widows chosen into that order.

None of the magistrates have greater honour paid them than is paid the
priests; and if they should happen to commit any crime, they would not
be questioned for it. Their punishment is left to God, and to their own
consciences; for they do not think it lawful to lay hands on any man,
how wicked soever he is, that has been in a peculiar manner dedicated to
God; nor do they find any great inconvenience in this, both because they
have so few priests, and because these are chosen with much caution, so
that it must be a very unusual thing to find one who merely out of
regard to his virtue, and for his being esteemed a singularly good man,
was raised up to so great a dignity, degenerate into corruption and
vice. And if such a thing should fall out, for man is a changeable
creature, yet there being few priests, and these having no authority but
what rises out of the respect that is paid them, nothing of great
consequence to the public can pro