It is better to suffer for wrong doing than not to suffer.
There might have been a condition of human life in which the penalty
followed at once, and was proportioned to the offence. Moral evil would
then be scarcely distinguishable from physical; mankind would avoid
vice as they avoid pain or death. But nature, with a view of deepening
and enlarging our characters, has for the most part hidden from us the
consequences of our actions, and we can only foresee them by an effort
of reflection. To awaken in us this habit of reflection is the business
of early education, which is continued in maturer years by observation
and experience. The spoilt child is in later life said to be
unfortunate—he had better have suffered when he was young, and been
saved from suffering afterwards. But is not the sovereign equally
unfortunate whose education and manner of life are always concealing
from him the consequences of his own actions, until at length they are
revealed to him in some terrible downfall, which may, perhaps, have
been caused not by his own fault? Another illustration is afforded by
the pauper and criminal classes, who scarcely reflect at all, except on
the means by which they can compass their immediate ends. We pity them,
and make allowances for them; but we do not consider that the same
principle applies to human actions generally. Not to have been found
out in some dishonesty or folly, regarded from a moral or religious
point of view, is the greatest of misfortunes. The success of our evil
doings is a proof that the gods have ceased to strive with us, and have
given us over to ourselves. There is nothing to remind us of our sins,
and therefore nothing to correct them. Like our sorrows, they are
healed by time;
“While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.”
The “accustomed irony” of Socrates adds a corollary to the
argument:—“Would you punish your enemy, you should allow him to escape
unpunished”—this is the true retaliation. (Compare the obscure verse of
Proverbs, “Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him,” etc., quoted in
Romans.)
Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own
lives: they do not easily see themselves as others see them. They are
very kind and very blind to their own faults; the rhetoric of self-love
is always pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting a similar
figure of speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence
but in accusation of themselves. As they are guided by feeling rather
than by reason, to their feelings the appeal must be made. They must
speak to themselves; they must argue with themselves; they must paint
in eloquent words the character of their own evil deeds. To any
suffering which they have deserved, they must persuade themselves to
submit. Under the figure there lurks a real thought, which, expressed
in another form, admits of an easy application to ourselves. For do not
we too accuse as well as excuse ourselves? And we call to our aid the
rhetoric of prayer and preaching, which the mind silently employs while
the struggle between the better and the worse is going on within us.
And sometimes we are too hard upon ourselves, because we want to
restore the balance which self-love has overthrown or disturbed; and
then again we may hear a voice as of a parent consoling us. In
religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the consciences
of men “accusing or else excusing them.” For all our life long we are
talking with ourselves:—What is thought but speech? What is feeling but
rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be always
in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at
first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us.