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, xxv. 21, 22, ‘Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him,’ etc.,
quoted in Romans xii. 20.)
[Sidenote: _Better to suffer for wrong doing than not to suffer._]
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 (Soph. 263 E)? 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.