framework of this monarchy, this great edifice, notably in its old age, having been displaced and loosened by novelty, afford all the opening and entrance you please to such outrages. (c) The royal majesty is cast down with much more difficulty, says an ancient writer, from the summit to the halfway point, than hurled from that point into the depths. But if the inventors are the more harmful, the imitators are the more vicious in recklessly following examples of which they have perceived and punished the detestableness and the evil; and if there are degrees of honour, even in doing evil, the latter should accord to the others the glory of the invention and the courage of the first attempt.
(b) All sorts of new disorders draw, by luck, from this first and prolific source, devices and models for disturbing our government. We read in our very laws, designed to remedy this original evil, the training and excuse for all sorts of evil undertakings; and there happens to us what Thucydides says of the civil wars of his time — that, favouring the public vices, they created new and gentler words in their excuse, falsifying and softening their true names.[1] And this, howsoever, is to reform our consciences and our beliefs! Honesta oratio est.[2] But the best pretext for innovation is very hazardous. (c) Adeo nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est.[3] (b) And it seems to me, to speak frankly; that there is great self-love and presumption in setting so high a value on one’s opinions that, to establish them, it is necessary to upset public tranquillity and to introduce so many inevitable evils and such shocking corruption of morals as civil wars bring about, and the mutations in the state in a matter of such weight — and to introduce them into one’s own country. (c) Is it not bad management to bring to the front so many certain and known vices, to combat errors denied and debatable? Is there any worse sort of vice than those which offend one’s own conscience and instinctive knowledge? The [Roman] Senate, in the dispute between it and the people as
