Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/61

 and civil prudence could not but extol. It was thought of old in Philosophy, that shame or to call it better, the reverence of our elders, our brethren, and friends was the greatest incitement to vertuous deeds and the greatest dissuasion from unworthy attempts that might be. Hence we may read in the Iliad where Hector being wisht to retire from the battel, many of his forces being routed, makes answer that he durst not for shame, lest the Trojan Knights and Dames should think he did ignobly. And certain it is that wheras Terror is thought such a great stickler in a Commonwealth, honourable shame is a farre greater, and has more reason. For where shame is there is fear, but where fear is there is not presently shame. And if any thing may be done to inbreed in us this generous and Christianly reverence one of another, the very Nurs and Guardian of piety and vertue, it can not sooner be then by such a discipline in the Church, as may use us to have in aw the assemblies of the faithful, & to count it a thing most grievous, next to the grieving of Gods Spirit, to offend those whom he hath put in autority, as a healing superintendence over our lives and behaviours, both to our own happines and that we may not give offence to good men, who without amends by us made, dare not against Gods command hold communion with us in holy things. And this will be accompanied with a religious dred of being outcast from the company of Saints, and from the fatherly protection of God in his Church, to consort with the devil and his angels. But there is yet a more ingenuous and noble degree of honest shame, or call it if you will an esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence toward their own persons. And if the love of God as a fire sent from heaven to be ever kept alive upon the altar of our hearts, be the first principle of all godly and vertuous actions in men, this pious and just honouring of our selves is the second, and may be thought as the radical moisture and fountain head, whence every laudable and worthy enterprize issues forth. And although I have giv'n it the name of a liquid thing, yet is it not incontinent to bound it self, as humid things are, but hath in it a most restraining and powerfull abstinence to start back, and glob it self upward from the mixture of any ungenerous and unbeseeming motion, or any soile wherewith it may peril to stain it self. Something I confesse it is to be asham'd of evil doing in the presence of any, and to reverence the opinion and the countenance of a good man rather then a bad, fearing most in his sight to offend, goes so farre as almost to be vertuous; yet this is but still the feare Rh