e. Ibid., V, 15-22.
POLITICAL WRITINGS 93
You're bloated by ambition? take advice: Yon book will ease you if you read it thrice.'*
And the same poet, in a lyric song, hath thus spoken with the desire of repressing the passion for domination:
Rule an ambitious spirit, and thou hast A wider kingdom than if thou shouldst join To distant Gades Lybia, and thus Shouldst hold in service either Carthaginian.'
Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base. Still, ^ith regard to those to whom God did not puq)ose to give eternal life with His holy angels in His own celestial city ... if He had also withheld from them the terrestrial glory of that most excellent empire, a reward would not have been rendered to their good arts—that is, their virtues—by which they sought to attain so great glory. For as to those who seem to do some good that they may receive glory from men, the Lord also says, "Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward." ^ So also these despised their own private affairs for the sake of the repubhc, and for its treasury resisted avarice, consulted for the good of their country with a spirit of freedom, addicted neither to what their laws pronounced to be crime nor to
5. Horace, Epist, i. 1. 36, 37.
6. Her. Carm. ii. 2.
e. Ibid., V, 15-22.
7. Matt. vi. 2.