t the chairs of princes, or spoken parables amongst the rulers of
cities. Our virtues are but in the seed when the grace of God comes
upon us first; but this grace must be thrown into broken furrows, and
must twice feel the cold and twice feel the heat, and be softened with
storms and showers, and then it will arise into fruitfulness and
harvests. And what is there in the world to distinguish virtues from
dishonors, or the valor of Caesar from the softness of the Egyptian
eunuchs, or that can make anything rewardable but the labor and the
danger, the pain and the difficulty? Virtue could not be anything but
sensuality if it were the entertainment of our senses and fond
desires; and Apicius had been the noblest of all the Romans, if
feeding and great appetite and despising the severities of temperance
had been the work and proper employment of a wise man. But otherwise
do fathers and otherwise do mothers handle their children. These
soften them with kisses and imperfect noises, with the pap and
breast-milk of soft endearments; they rescue them from tutors and
snatch them from discipline; they desire to keep them fat and warm,
and their feet dry, and their bellies full: and then the children
govern, and cry, and prove fools and troublesome, so long as the
feminine republic does endure.

But fathers--because they design to have their children wise and
valiant, apt for counsel or for arms--send them to severe governments,
and tie them to study, to hard labor, and afflictive contingencies.
They rejoice when the bold boy strikes a lion with his hunting-spear,
and shrinks not when the beast comes to affright his early courage.
Softness is for slaves and beasts, for minstrels and useless persons,
for such who can not ascend higher than the state of a fair ox or a
servant entertained for vainer offices; but the man that designs his
son for nobler employments--to honors and to triumphs, to consular
dignities and presidencies of councils--loves to see him pale with
study or panting with labor, hardened with suffrance or eminent by
dangers. And so God dresses us for heaven: he loves to see us
struggling with a disease, and resisting the devil, and contesting
against the weaknesses of nature, and against hope to believe in
hope--resigning ourselves to God's will, praying Him to choose for us,
and dying in all things but faith and its blest consequents; _ut ad
officium cum periculo sinus prompti_--and the danger and the
resistance s