our having
enjoyed them in the past. We are frequently not able to enjoy a benefit
for long, but the benefit is not thereby destroyed. Let Nature struggle
as hard as she please, she cannot give herself retrospective action. A
man may lose his house, his money, his property--everything to which the
name of benefit can be given--yet the benefit itself will remain firm
and unmoved; no power can prevent his benefactor's having bestowed them,
or his having received them.

III. I think that a fine passage in Rabirius's poem, where M. Antonius,
seeing his fortune deserting him, nothing left him except the privilege
of dying, and even that only on condition that he used it promptly,
exclaims,

"What I have given, that I now possess!"

How much he might have possessed, had he chosen! These are riches to be
depended upon, which through all the turmoil of human life will remain
steadfast; and the greater they are, the less envy they will attract.
Why are you sparing of your property, as though it were your own? You
are but the manager of it. All those treasures, which make you swell
with pride, and soar above mere mortals, till you forget the weakness of
your nature; all that which you lock up in iron-grated treasuries, and
guard in arms, which you win from other men with their lives, and defend
at the risk of your own; for which you launch fleets to dye the sea with
blood, and shake the walls of cities, not knowing what arrows fortune
may be preparing for you behind your back; to gain which you have so
often violated all the ties of relationship, of friendship, and of
colleagueship, till the whole world lies crushed between the two
combatants: all these are not yours; they are a kind of deposit, which
is on the point of passing into other hands: your enemies, or your
heirs, who are little better, will seize upon them. "How," do you ask,
"can you make them your own?" "By giving them away." Do, then, what is
best for your own interests, and gain a sure enjoyment of them, which
cannot be taken from you, making them at once more certainly yours, and
more honorable to you. That which you esteem so highly, that by which
you think that you are made rich and powerful, owns but the shabby title
of "house," "slave," or "money;" but when you have given it away, it
becomes a benefit.

IV. "You admit," says our adversary, "that we sometimes are under no
obligation to him from whom we have received a benefit. In that case it
has been ta