as Euripides saith. Nor are we easy or without regret when we hear this:
Him speaking thus th’ eternal brightness leaves,
Where night the wearied steeds of day receives.
28. And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of immortality
they take away the sweetest and greatest hopes the vulgar sort have.
And what shall we then think they take away from the good and those
that have led pious and just lives, who expect no ill after death, but
on the contrary most glorious and divine things? For, in the first
place, champions are not used to receive the garland before they have
performed their exercises, but after they have contested and proved
victorious; in like manner is it with those that are persuaded that
good men have the prize of their conquests after this life is ended;
it is marvellous to think to what a pitch of grandeur their virtue
raises their spirits upon the contemplation of those hopes, among the
which this is one, that they shall one day see those men that are now
insolent by reason of their wealth and power, and that foolishly flout
at their betters, undergo just punishment. In the next place, none of
the lovers of truth and the contemplation of being have here their fill
of them; they having but a watery and puddled reason to speculate with,
as it were, through the fog and mist of the body; and yet they still
look upwards like birds, as ready to take their flight to the spacious
and bright region, and endeavor to make their souls expedite and
light from things mortal, using philosophy as a study and preparation
for death. Thus I account death a truly great and accomplished good
thing; the soul being to live there a real life, which here lives not
a waking life, but suffers things most resembling dreams. If then (as
Epicurus saith) the remembrance of a dead friend be a thing every way
complacent; we may easily from thence imagine how great a joy they
deprive themselves of who think they do but embrace and pursue the
phantoms and shades of their deceased familiars, that have in them
neither knowledge nor sense, but who never expect to be with them
again, or to see their dear father and dear mother and sweet wife, nor
have any hopes of that familiarity and dear converse they have that
think of the soul with Pythagoras, Plato, and Homer. Now what their
sort of passion is like to was hinted at by Homer, when he threw into
the midst of the soldiers, as they were engaged, the shade of Aeneas,
as if he had been dead, and afterwards again presented his friends with
him himself,
Coming alive and well, as brisk as ever;
at which, he saith,