Ethical Handbook

To the Reader.

...[and I have frequently endeavored] to recall that ancient [wisdom] as if by the right of Postliminy original: postliminio; a legal term referring to the right of a person to return to their original status and property after being released from captivity. Here, the author suggests he is "reclaiming" ancient virtue for the modern world..

If anyone should perhaps contend that I have done this more redundantly and more copiously than was necessary, I truly do not resist the charge much. For I confess that I have seized every opportunity to display before the eyes of the Christian World that holy sense of Virtue, which was so deeply seated even in the minds of the Pagans original: Ethnicorum; referring to the non-Christian classical philosophers of Greece and Rome., and which they testified to so clearly through those divine sayings and opinions they committed to writing. It is right that we Christians should be ashamed that there are so few among us who are found to live as justly or to speak as wisely; indeed, we have been so blinded that we trample upon and despise both the reality and the name of Virtue—as if by deliberate effort—as if it were something vile and profane, to be left to the Barbarian Nations. In doing this, however, we do not insult foreign nations so much as we display our own gross ignorance.

For true Virtue is a certain participation in the Divine Nature. For this reason, it must be rightly and deservedly considered a principal part of the Christian Religion. For although those three things, which occur so often in the speech of men...