Montaigne says we have an infectious touch. By our manner of handling we corrupt things that in themselves are laudable and good. We may grasp virtue so that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it too stringently and with too violent a desire. Those who say there is never any excess in virtue, because it is not virtue once it becomes excess, only play upon words. Horace supplies the sting: let the wise man bear the name of a madman, the just one of an unjust, if he seek wisdom more than is sufficient. Holy Writ agrees: be not wiser than you should, but be soberly wise. Montaigne has known a great man who prejudiced the opinion men had of his devotion by pretending to be devout beyond all examples of others of his condition; Coste's note takes that man for Henry III. Montaigne loves temperate and moderate natures. An immoderate zeal, even to that which is good, astonishes him. Neither the mother of Pausanias, who was the first instructor of her son's process and threw the first stone towards his death, nor Posthumius the dictator, who put his son to death because the ardour of youth had pushed him a little more advanced than the rest of his squadron, appear to him so much just as strange. He would neither advise nor like to follow so savage a virtue, and that costs so dear.
The archer that shoots over misses as much as he that falls short, and it is equally troublesome to Montaigne's sight to look up at a great light and to look down into a dark abyss. Callicles in Plato says the extremity of philosophy is hurtful: taken moderately it is pleasant and useful, but beyond the limits of profit it renders a man brutish, a contemner of religion and the common laws, unfit for public administration. The love we bear to our wives is very lawful, yet theology thinks fit to curb it. Saint Thomas Aquinas fears that kindred added to conjugal affection may carry a husband beyond the bounds of reason. Montaigne therefore teaches husbands too vehement in the matrimonial duty that even those pleasures are reproachable if immoderate; he always went the plain way to work. The same surplus spoils office: Epaminondas will not free a young man at Pelopidas's request, but grants the same at once to a wench, calling it a gratification fit for her, not for a captain; Pericles tells Sophocles that a praetor ought to have his hands, and his eyes too, chaste. There is no pleasure so just and lawful where intemperance and excess are not to be condemned.
But is not man a most miserable creature the while? It is scarce in his power to taste one pleasure pure and entire, and yet he must be contriving doctrines to curtail that little he has. Human wisdom makes ill use of her talent when she rescinds from the number and sweetness of the pleasures that are naturally our due. Spiritual and corporal physicians, as by compact, can find no other remedy for body and soul than misery and pain: watchings, fastings, hair-shirts, remote banishments, perpetual imprisonments, whips. Gallio, sent an exile into the isle of Lesbos, lived there as merry as the day was long, so the Senate recalled him home and confined him to his own house, to accommodate the punishment to his feeling. To him whom fasting would make more healthful, the prescription has no curative effect. The nature that would eat rhubarb like buttered turnips would frustrate the use of it: it must trouble the stomach if it is to purge.
This belief a little resembles that other ancient one of thinking to gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder, an opinion once received in all religions. Amurath, at the taking of the Isthmus, immolated six hundred young Greeks to his father's soul as a propitiatory sacrifice. In the new countries discovered in this age, idols reek with human blood, and the poor souls who are to be sacrificed go about some days before to beg alms for the offering, presenting themselves to the slaughter, singing and dancing with the spectators. The ambassadors of the king of Mexico tell Fernando Cortez that their master is obliged yearly to offer to the gods fifty thousand men, and that he maintains a continual war principally to furnish those sacrifices with prisoners. One last tale: some of these people, beaten by him, send messengers with three sorts of gifts. Behold, lord, here are five slaves: if thou art a furious god that feedeth upon flesh and blood, eat these, and we will bring thee more. If thou art an affable god, behold here incense and feathers. But if thou art a man, take these fowls and these fruits that we have brought thee.
