על שהרע נוהג לארוב לטוב כ״אThat the Worse is wont to Attack the Better 21
א׳
1[72] Sophists are bound to find the powers within them at strife, words running counter to ideas and wishes to words, in absolute and utter discord. They make our ears ache with their demonstrations of the social character of righteousness, the advantageous nature of moderation, the nobility of self-control, the great benefits conferred by piety, the power of every kind of virtue to bring health and safety. On the other hand they dwell at great length on the unsociability of injustice, on the loss of health entailed by a licentious life, and prove ad nauseam that irreligion makes you a pariah, and that serious harm is occasioned by all other forms of wickedness.
ב׳
2[73] And nevertheless they entertain all the time sentiments quite at variance with the things which they say. At the very moment when they are singing the praises of good sense and moderation and righteousness and piety, they are found to be more than ever practising foolishness, licentiousness, injustice, and impiety, to be confounding and overturning, you may wellnigh say, every ordinance of God or man.
ג׳
3[74] To these men one might rightly put the question put to Cain in the sacred record, “What have you done?” What have you wrought that has done you good,? What benefit have all these harangues on the subject of virtue conferred on your own souls? What portion, great or small, of life have you set right? Nay, have you not done the reverse? Have you not furnished true charges against yourselves, in that, while you have shown yourselves lecturers of the highest order as far as understanding of beautiful things and philosophical discourses are concerned, you are invariably caught cherishing sentiments and indulging in practices that are utterly base? May we not go further and say that in your souls all noble qualities have died, while evil qualities have been quickened? It is because of this that not one of you is really still alive.
ד׳
4[75] When a musician or a scholar has died, the music or scholarship, that has its abode in individual masters, has indeed perished with him, but the original patterns of these remain, and may be said to live as long as the world lasts; and by conforming to these the men of this generation, and those of all future generations in perpetual succession, will attain to being musicians or scholars. In exactly the same way, if what is sensible or modest or brave or just or, to say it in one word, wise, be destroyed, none the less does there stand, inscribed on the undying tablets of the universe, good sense with a life that dies not, and all virtue exempt from decay; and it is by having part in this excellence that men are truly wise to-day, and will be so in days to come.
ה׳
5[76] It must be so, unless we are to say that the death of some individual man has wrought destruction on mankind. What “mankind” is, whether a class, or an original pattern, or a conception, or whatever we may call it, is a matter for the decision of those who make exactness in the use of terms their study. A single seal has often left its impress on innumerable substances, and it has sometimes happened that all the impressions have vanished with the very substances on which they were made, while the seal has in its own nature taken no hurt but remains just as it was to begin with.
ו׳
6[77] In the face of a fact like this, must we not believe that the virtues will retain for ever their own nature, incapable of damage or decay, even if all the characters which they have stamped on the souls of those who have come under their influence have become faint, owing to a bad life or from some other cause? We see, then, that those who are devoid of culture being uninitiated into the difference between wholes and parts and between classes and species, and know not how, though different, they may bear the same name, completely mix up and confound all things.
ז׳
7[78] Wherefore let every lover of self, surnamed “Cain,” be taught that he has slain that which shares Abel’s name, the specimen, the part, the impression stamped to resemble him, not the original, not the class, not the pattern, though he fancies that these, which are imperishable, have perished together with the living beings. Let some one say, taunting and ridiculing him: What have you done, poor wretch? Does not the God-loving creed, which you imagine you have annihilated, live with God? You have proved to be your own murderer, having slain by guile that which alone had the power to enable you to live a guiltless life.