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Whoever Intends to have Children must have Recourse to Folly
And now, lest I may seem to have taken upon me the name of
goddess without cause, you shall in the next place understand how
far my deity extends, and what advantage by it I have brought both
to gods and men. For, if it was not unwisely said by somebody, that
this only is to be a god, to help men; and if they are deservedly
enrolled among the gods that first brought in corn and wine and such
other things as are for the common good of mankind, why am not I of
right the alpha, or first, of all the gods? who being but one, yet
bestow all things on all men. For first, what is more sweet or more
precious than life? And yet from whom can it more properly be said
to come than from me? For neither the crab-favoured Pallas' spear
nor the cloud-gathering Jupiter's shield either beget or propagate
mankind; but even he himself, the father of gods and king of men at
whose very beck the heavens shake, must lay by his forked thunder
and those looks wherewith he conquered the giants and with which at
pleasure he frightens the rest of the gods, and like a common stage
player put on a disguise as often as he goes about that, which now and
then he does, that is to say the getting of children: And the Stoics
too, that conceive themselves next to the gods, yet show me one of
them, nay the veriest bigot of the sect, and if he do not put off
his beard, the badge of wisdom, though yet it be no more than what
is common with him and goats; yet at least he must lay by his
supercilious gravity, smooth his forehead, shake off his rigid
principles, and for some time commit an act of folly and dotage. In
fine, that wise man whoever he be, if he intends to have children,
must have recourse to me.
But tell me, I beseech you, what man is that would submit his
neck to the noose of wedlock, if, as wise men should, he did but first
truly weigh the convenience of the thing? Or what woman is there would
ever go to it did she seriously consider either the peril of
child-bearing or the trouble of bringing them up? So then, if you
owe your beings to wedlock, you owe that wedlock to this my
follower, Madness; and what you owe to me I have already told you.
Again, she that has but once tried what it is, would she, do you
think, make a second venture if it were not for my other companion,
Oblivion? Nay, even Venus herself, notwithstanding whatever
Lucretius has said, would not deny but that all her virtue were lame
and fruitless without the help of my deity. For out of that little,
odd, ridiculous May-game came the supercilious philosophers, in
whose room have succeeded a kind of people the world calls monks,
cardinals, priests, and the most holy popes. And lastly, all that
rabble of the poets' gods, with which heaven is so thwacked and
thronged, that though it be of so vast an extent, they are hardly able
to crowd one by another.
But I think it is a small matter that you thus owe your beginning
of life to me, unless I also show you that whatever benefit you
receive in the progress of it is of my gift likewise. For what other
is this? Can that be called life where you take away pleasure? Oh!
Do you like what I say? I knew none of you could have so little wit,
or so much folly, or wisdom rather, as to be of any other opinion. For
even the Stoics themselves that so severely cried down pleasure did
but handsomely dissemble, and railed against it to the common people
to no other end but that having discouraged them from it, they might
the more plentifully enjoy it themselves.
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