Ethical Handbook

To the Reader.

...for I thought that Vice must be conquered by Virtue alone; however, I believed that true and living Virtue cannot be taught, but must be drawn through Faith in God, from the living God and His living Oracles In a 17th-century theological context, "Oracles" refers to the Holy Scriptures.. For there must be a certain divine sense The author refers to a spiritual intuition or "moral sense," a concept central to the Cambridge Platonists. underlying it; he who possesses and nurtures this, and does not knowingly and willingly violate or wound it, will at last easily judge, as if of his own accord, what is honorable or shameful in every matter.

But he who is deprived of this sense, however well-instructed he may be in all manner of Distributions and Definitions of the Virtues, will nevertheless never arrive at true Virtue; nor, since he has not yet stripped off his [old] self, will he recognize what true Virtue is, nor perhaps even believe it to be anything more than an empty name. With which kind of monsters (alas!) almost all places are filled in this age.

The second reason was that I had recently devoted my time and mind to certain most pleasant studies, from which I was very reluctant to be so suddenly torn away; especially since, after my strength had been undermined and dried up by certain recent labors—and those a bit more intense than usual—[I was enjoying] the gentle and dewy breeze of these new speculations...