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Our judgments are yet sick, and obey the humour of our depraved manners. I observe most of the wits of these times pretend to ingenuity, by endeavouring to blemish and darken the glory of the bravest and most generous actions of former ages, putting one vile interpretation or another upon them, and forging and supposing vain causes and motives for the noble things they did: a mighty subtlety indeed! Give me the greatest and most unblemished action that ever the day beheld, and I will contrive a hundred plausible drifts and ends to obscure it. God knows, whoever will stretch them out to the full, what diversity of images our internal wills suffer under. They do not so maliciously play the censurers, as they do it ignorantly and rudely in all their detractions.

It is true, that correction is necessary, yet within reason and bounds; for it does not hurt, but profits us under an appearance of harm. Ill dispositions in the mind are to be dealt with as those in the body: the physician first tries purging and abstinence; if this will not do, he proceeds to bleeding, nay, to dismembering rather than fail; for there is no operation too severe that ends in health. The public magistrate begins with persuasion, and his business is to beget a detestation for vice, and a veneration for virtue; from thence, if need be, he advances to admonition and reproach, and then to punishments; but moderate and revocable, unless the wickedness be incurable, and then the punishment must be so too. There is only this difference, the physician when he cannot save his patient’s life, endeavors to make his death easy; but the magistrate aggravates the death of the criminal with infamy and disgrace; not as delighting in the severity of it, (for no good man can be so barbarous) but for example, and to the end that they that will do no good living may do some dead. The end of all correction is either the amendment of wicked men, or to prevent the influence of ill example: for men are punished with a respect to the future; not to expiate offenses committed, but for fear of worse to come. Public offenders must be a terror to others; but still, all this while, the power of life and death must not be managed with passion. The medicine, in the mean time must be suited to the disease; infamy cures one, pain another, exile cures a third, beggary a fourth; but there are some that are only to be cured by the gibbet. I would be no more angry with a thief, or a traitor, than I am angry with myself when I open a vein. All punishment is but a moral or civil remedy. I do not do anything that is very ill, but yet I transgress often.

In that great battle of Plataea, that the Greeks under the command of Pausanias gained against Mardonius and the Persians, the conquerors, according to their custom, coming to divide amongst them the glory of the exploit, attributed to the Spartan nation the pre-eminence of valour in the engagement. The Spartans, great judges of virtue, when they came to determine to what particular man of their nation the honour was due of having the best behaved himself upon this occasion, found that Aristodemus had of all others hazarded his person with the greatest bravery; but did not, however, allow him any prize, by reason that his virtue had been incited by a desire to clear his reputation from the reproach of his miscarriage at the business of Thermopylae, and to die bravely to wipe off that former blemish.

If anger was sufferable in any case, it might be allowed against an incorrigible criminal under the hand of justice: but punishment is not matter of anger but of caution. The law is without passion, and strikes malefactors as we do serpents and venomous creatures, for fear of greater mischief. It is not for the dignity of a judge, when he comes to pronounce the fatal sentence, to express any motions of anger in his looks, words, or gestures: for he condemns the vice, not the man; and looks upon the wickedness without anger, as he does upon the prosperity of wicked men without envy. But though he be not angry, I would have him a little moved in point of humanity; but yet without any offence, either to his place or wisdom. Our passions vary, but reason is equal; and it were a great folly for that which is stable, faithful, and sound, to repair for succor to that which is uncertain, false, and distempered. If the offender be incurable, take him out of the world, that if he will not be good he may cease to be evil; but this must be without anger too. Does any man hate an arm, or a leg, when he cuts it off; or reckon that a passion which is only a miserable cure? We knock mad dogs on the head, and remove scabbed sheep out of the fold: and this is not anger still, but reason, to separate the sick from the sound. Justice cannot be angry; nor is there any need of an angry magistrate for the punishment of foolish and wicked men. The power of life and death must not be managed with passion. We give a horse the spur that is restive or jadish, and tries to cast his rider; but this is without anger too, and only to take down his stomach, and bring him, by correction, to obedience.

‘Tis a gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue, as on the tip of the ear, for ornament only. There are no longer virtuous actions extant; those actions that carry a show of virtue have yet nothing of its essence; by reason that profit, glory, fear, custom, and other suchlike foreign causes, put us on the way to produce them. Our justice also, valour, courtesy, may be called so too, in respect to others and according to the face they appear with to the public; but in the doer it can by no means be virtue, because there is another end proposed, another moving cause. Now virtue owns nothing to be hers, but what is done by herself and for herself alone.

There passes not a day over our heads but he that is choleric shall have some cause or other of displeasure, either from men, accidents, or business. He shall never stir out of his house but he shall meet with criminals of all sorts; prodigal, impudent, covetous, perfidious, contentious, children persecuting their parents, parents cursing their children, the innocent accused, the delinquent acquitted, and the judge practicing that in his chamber which he condemns upon the bench. In fine, wherever there are men there are faults; and upon these terms, Socrates himself should never bring the same countenance home again that he carried out with him.