על שהרע נוהג לארוב לטוב ל״טThat the Worse is wont to Attack the Better 39
א׳
1[141] Let what we have said on this passage suffice: let us investigate the words that follow. They are these: “And Cain said to the Lord, The charge to which abandonment exposes me is too great” (Gen. 4:13). The character of this cry will appear from a comparison of like cases. If the helmsman should abandon a ship at sea, must not all arrangements for sailing the ship go wrong? Again, if a charioteer quit a horse-chariot during a race, does it not necessarily follow that the chariot’s course will lose all order and direction? And again, when a city has been abandoned by rulers or laws—and of course rulers are living tables on which laws are inscribed—does not that city become a prey to two very great evils, anarchy and lawlessness?
ב׳
2[142] Need I add that it is a law of nature that the body perishes if the soul quit it, and the soul if reason quit it, and reason if it be deprived of virtue? Now if each presence that I have named becomes an occasion of loss and damage to those abandoned by it, how great a disaster must we infer that those will experience who have been forsaken by God; men whom He rejects as deserters, false to the most sacred ordinances, and sends into banishment, having tested them and found them unworthy of His rule and governance? For, to say all in a word, it is certain that he who is left by a benefactor far greater than himself is involved in charges and accusations of the most serious kind. For when would you say that the unskilled man suffers the greatest harm? Would it not be when he is entirely let alone by science?
ג׳
3[143] When would you say it of the man that is unlearned and utterly uneducated? Would it not be when instruction and pupilage have executed a deed of abandonment in his case? And when do we pronounce foolish people more than usually unhappy? Is it not when sound sense rejects them for good and all? When do we so regard the licentious or the unjust? Is it not when self-mastery and justice issue against them a sentence of eternal banishment? When the irreligious? Is it not when religion excludes them from her own sacred rites?
ד׳
4[144] This being so, it seems to me that those who are not utterly beyond cleansing would pray to be punished rather than be let go; for dismissal will most easily overturn them like vessels without ballast or helmsman, while punishment will set them up again.
ה׳
5[145] Are not boys who are rebuked by their slave-tutors when they do wrong better than those who are without tutors? Are not apprentices who are found fault with by their masters when they do not succeed in the craft they are learning better than those who have no one to chide them? Are not youths without someone to direct them inferior to, and less well off than, those who, best of all, have been vouchsafed the natural direction and guidance which has been assigned to parents over their children, or, failing that, have been placed under the next-best sort of guides, whom pity for fatherless children so often appoints to fill the place of parents in all that is for their good?