reckoned a virtue, because by it greater vice is restrained._
Wherefore, when the kingdoms of the East had been illustrious for
a long time, it pleased God that there should also arise a Western
empire, which, though later in time, should be more illustrious
in extent and greatness. And, in order that it might overcome the
grievous evils which existed among other nations, He purposely
granted it to such men as, for the sake of honour, and praise, and
glory, consulted well for their country, in whose glory they sought
their own, and whose safety they did not hesitate to prefer to their
own, suppressing the desire of wealth and many other vices for
this one vice, namely, the love of praise. For he has the soundest
perception who recognises that even the love of praise is a vice; nor
has this escaped the perception of the poet Horace, who says,
"You're bloated by ambition? take advice:
Yon book will ease you if you read it thrice."[203]
And the same poet, in a lyric song, hath thus spoken with the desire
of repressing the passion for domination:
"Rule an ambitious spirit, and thou hast
A wider kingdom than if thou shouldst join
To distant Gades Lybia, and thus
Shouldst hold in service either Carthaginian."[204]
Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of
the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love
of intelligible beauty, but by desire of human praise, or, at
all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are
not indeed yet holy, but only less base. Even Tully was not able
to conceal this fact; for, in the same books which he wrote, _De
Republica_, when speaking concerning the education of a chief of
the state, who ought, he says, to be nourished on glory, goes on to
say that their ancestors did many wonderful and illustrious things
through desire of glory. So far, therefore, from resisting this
vice, they even thought that it ought to be excited and kindled up,
supposing that that would be beneficial to the republic. But not even
in his books on philosophy does Tully dissimulate this poisonous
opinion, for he there avows it more clearly than day. For when he is
speaking of those studies which are to be pursued with a view to the
_true good_, and not with the vainglorious desire of human praise, he
introduces the following universal and general statement:
"Honour nourishes the arts, and all are stimulated to the
prosecution of studies by glory; and those pursuits are always
neglected which are generally discredited."[205]