XXVII

OF ZALEUCUS, AND SOME OTHER LEGISLATORS

I DARE here defy all moralists and legislators, and I ask them all, if they ever delivered anything finer, or more useful, than the exordium of the laws of Zaleucus, who lived before Pythagoras, and who was the first magistrate of the Locrians?

“Every citizen should be persuaded of the existence of the divinity. It is only necessary to observe the order and harmony of the universe, to be convinced that accident could not have formed it. We should subdue the soul, purify it, and cleanse it from all evil; in the persuasion that God cannot be well served by those of a perverse disposition; and that he does not resemble those wretched mortals, who let themselves be wrought upon by magnificent ceremonies and sumptuous offerings. Virtue alone, and a constant disposition of doing good, can please him. Let us then endeavor to be just in our principles and practice; we shall thereby become dear to the divinity. Every one should dread more what leads to ignominy, than what leads to poverty. He should be looked upon as the best citizen, who gives up his fortune for justice; but those whose violent passions lead them to evil, men, women, citizens, common inhabitants, should be cautioned to remember the gods, and to think often of the severe judgments which they exercise against the wicked; let them have the hour of their death before their eyes, the fatal hour which awaits us all, the hour when the remembrance of faults brings on remorse, and the vain regret of not having let all our actions be swayed by equity.

“Everyone should therefore conduct himself, as if this moment was the last of his life; but if an evil genius prompts him to crimes, let him fly to the foot of the altar, and implore heaven to drive from him the ill-disposed genius; let him particularly throw himself into the arms of worthy people, whose counsels will bring him back to virtue, by representing to him God’s goodness and his vengeance.”

No; there is nothing in all antiquity that should obtain a preference to this simple, but sublime moral, dictated by reason and virtue, stripped of enthusiasm and of those gigantic figures, which good sense disowns.

Charondas, a disciple of Zaleucus, explained himself in the same manner. The Platos, Ciceros, and divine Antoniuses, have never since held any other language. Thus does Julian, who had the misfortune to give up the Christian religion, but who did so much honor to that of nature, explain himself; that Julian, who was the scandal of our church, and the glory of the Roman empire.

“The ignorant,” says he, “should be instructed, and not punished; they should be pitied, and not hated; the duty of an emperor is to imitate God; to imitate him is to have the fewest wants, and to do him all the good that is possible.”

Let those who insult antiquity, learn to be acquainted with it; let them not confound wife legislators with fabulists; let them know how to distinguish between the laws of the wisest magistrates, and the ridiculous customs of the people; let them not say that superstitious ceremonies were invented, that false oracles and false prodigies were without number; and that all the magistrates of Greece and Rome who tolerated them, were blindly imposed upon as well as impostors: this would be like saying there are bonzes in China who abuse the populace, and that therefore the wife of Confucius was a wretched impostor.

Men should, in so enlightened an age as this, blush at those declamations, which ignorance has so often promulgated against sages, who should be imitated, and not calumniated. Do we not know that in every country the vulgar are imbecile, superstitious, and insensible? Have there not been convulsionaries in the country of the chancellor de L’Hôpital, of Charon, Montagne, de la Motte, la Voyer, Descartes, Bayle, Fontenelle, and Montesquieu? Are there not Methodists, Moravians, Millenarians, and fanatics of every kind, in that country which was so fortunate as to give birth to the chancellor Bacon, to those immortal geniuses Newton and Locke, and to a multitude of great men?