mischance? They would take no excuse, that men might
understand that they were always bound to keep their word; it was
thought better that even a good excuse should not be accepted from a few
persons, than that all men should be led to try to make excuses. You say
that you have done all in your power to repay your debt; this ought to
be enough for your friend, but not enough for you. He to whom you owe a
kindness, is unworthy of gratitude if he lets all your anxious care and
trouble to repay it go for nothing; and so, too, if your friend takes
your good will as a repayment, you are ungrateful if you are not all the
more eager to feel the obligation of the debt which he has forgiven you.
Do not snap up his receipt, or call witnesses to prove it; rather seek
opportunities for repaying not less than before; repay the one man
because he asks for repayment, the other because he forgives you your
debt; the one because he is good, the other because he is bad. You, need
not, therefore, think that you have anything to do with the question
whether a man be bound to repay the benefit which he has received from
a wise man, if that man has ceased to be wise and has turned into a bad
man. You would return a deposit which you had received from a wise man;
you would return a loan even to a bad man; what grounds have you for
not returning a benefit also? Because he has changed, ought he to change
you? What? if you had received anything from a man when healthy, would
you not return it to him when he was sick, though we always are more
bound to treat our friends with more kindness when they are ailing? So,
too, this man is sick in his mind; we ought to help him, and bear with
him; folly is a disease of the mind.

XVII. I think here we ought to make a distinction, in order to render
this point more intelligible. Benefits are of two kinds: one, the
perfect and true benefit, which can only be bestowed by one wise man
upon another; the other, the common vulgar form which ignorant men like
ourselves interchange. With regard to the latter, there is no doubt that
it is my duty to repay it whether my friend turns out to be a murderer,
a thief, or an adulterer. Crimes have laws to punish them; criminals are
better reformed by judges than by ingratitude; a man ought not to make
you bad by being so himself. I will fling a benefit back to a bad man, I
will return it to a good man; I do so to the latter, because I owe it to
him; to the former, that I m