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We give a much more unlimited approval to their idea that the life of
the wise man must be social. For how could the city of God
(concerning which we are already writing no less than the nineteenth
book of this work) either take a beginning or be developed, or attain
its proper destiny, if the life of the saints were not a social life?
But who can enumerate all the great grievances with which human society
abounds in the misery of this mortal state? Who can weigh them? Hear
how one of their comic writers makes one of his characters express the
common feelings of all men in this matter: "I am married; this is
one misery. Children are born to me; they are additional cares."
What shall I say of the miseries of love which Terence also
recounts, "slights, suspicions, quarrels, war to-day, peace
to-morrow?" Is not human life full of such things? Do they not
often occur even in honorable friendships? On all hands we experience
these slights, suspicions, quarrels, war, all of which are undoubted
evils; while, on the other hand, peace is a doubtful good, because
we do not know the heart of our friend, and though we did know it
to-day, we should be as ignorant of what it might be to-morrow. Who
ought to be, or who are more friendly than those who live in the same
family? And yet who can rely even upon this friendship, seeing that
secret treachery has often broken it up, and produced enmity as bitter
as the amity was sweet, or seemed sweet by the most perfect
dissimulation? It is on this account that the words of Cicero so move
the heart of every one, and provoke a sigh: "There are no snares
more dangerous than those which lurk under the guise of duty or the name
of relationship. For the man who is your declared foe you can easily
baffle by precaution; but this hidden, intestine, and domestic danger
not merely exists, but overwhelms you before you can foresee and
examine it." It is also to this that allusion is made by the divine
saying, "A man's foes are those of his own household,", words
which one cannot hear without pain; for though a man have sufficient
fortitude to endure it with equanimity, and sufficient sagacity to
baffle the malice of a pretended friend, yet if he himself is a good
man, he cannot but be greatly pained at the discovery of the perfidy of
wicked men, whether they have always been wicked and merely feigned
goodness, or have fallen from a better to a malicious disposition.
If, then, home, the natural refuge from the ills of life, is itself
not safe, what shall we say of the city, which, as it is larger, is
so much the more filled with lawsuits civil and criminal, and is never
free from the fear, if sometimes from the actual outbreak, of
disturbing and bloody insurrections and civil wars?
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