OF EXILE OR BANISHMENT
THE SUMMARY
[There is not a man, how well soever framed to the world and settled therein, who can promise unto himself any peaceable and assured state throughout the course of his whole life; but according as it seemeth good to the eternal and wise providence of the Almighty (which governeth all things) to chastise our faults, or to try our constancy in faith; he ought in time of a calm to prepare himself for a tempest, and not to attend the midst of a danger before he provide for his safety, but betimes and long before to fortify and furnish himself with that whereof he may have need another day in all occurrences and accidents whatsoever. Our author, therefore, in this treatise writing to comfort and encourage one of his friends, cast down with anguish occasioned by his banishment, sheweth throughout all his discourse that virtue it is which maketh us happy in every place, and that there is nothing but vice that can hurt and endamage us. Now as touching his particularising of this point, in the first place he treateth what kind of friends we have need of in our affliction, and how we ought then to serve our turns with them: and in regard of exile more particularly, he adjoineth this advertisement, above all other things to see unto those goods which we may enjoy during the same, and to oppose them against the present grief and sorrow. Afterwards he proveth by sundry and divers reasons, that banishment is not in itself simply naught; he discovereth and layeth open the folly and misery of those who are too much addicted unto one country, shewing by notable examples that a wise man may live at ease and contentment in all places; that the habitation in a strange region, and the same limited and confined straitly within certain precincts, doth much more good ordinarily than harm; that a large country lying out fax every way maketh a man never a whit the more happy: whereas contrariwise, to be enclosed and pent up bringeth many commodities with it, declaring that this is the only life; and that it is no life at all to be evermore flitting to and fro from place to place. Now when he hath beautified this theme abovesaid with many fair similitudes and proper inductions, he comforteth those who are debarred and excluded from any city or province; refuting with very good and sound arguments certain persons who held banishment for a note of infamy; shewing withal, that it is nothing else but sin and vice which bringeth a man into a lamentable state and condition: concluding by the examples of Anaxagoras and Socrates, that neither imprisonment, nor death, can enthral or make miserable the man who loveth virtue. And contrariwise, he giveth us to understand by the examples of Phaethon ind Icarus, that vicious and sinful persons fall daily and continually one way or other into most grievous calamities through their own audaciousness and folly.]
