II. Pythagoras, a famous and virtuous philosopher of Italy, being asked when men might take the pleasure of their passions, answered, "When they have a mind to be worse." He said the world was like a comedy, and the true philosophers the spectators. He would say, "That luxury led to debauchery, and debauchery to violence, and that to bitter repentance: that he who taketh too much care of his body makes the prison of his soul more insufferable: that those who do reprove us are our best friends; that men ought to preserve their bodies from diseases by temperance, their souls from ignorance by meditation, their will from vice by self-denial, and their country from civil war by justice: that it is better to be loved than feared; that virtue makes bold: but," saith he, "there is nothing so fearful as an evil conscience." He said, "That men should believe in a Divinity, that he _is_, and that he overlooks them, and neglecteth them not; there is no being nor place without God." He told the senators of Croton, being two thousand, praying his advice, "That they received their country as a depositum, or trust from the people; wherefore they should manage it accordingly, since they were to resign their account, with their trust to their children; that the way to do it was to be equal to all citizens, and to excel them in nothing more than justice; that every one of them should so govern his family that he might refer himself to his own house as to a court of judicature, taking great care to preserve natural affection; that they be examples of temperance in their own families, and to the city; that in courts of judicature none attest God by an oath, but use themselves so to speak as they may be believed without an oath: that the discourse of that philosopher is vain, by which no passion of a man is healed; for as there is no benefit of medicine if it expel not diseases out of bodies, so neither of philosophy if it expel not evil out of the soul."