The testimony of mankind through every period of the world, in regard to their own individual consciousness, attests a sense of the same fatal inability. If we go back even as far as to the heathen sages of antiquity, we gain the same acknowledgment. Thus we find Pythagoras calls it "the fatal companion, the noxious strife that lurks within us, and which was born along with us." Sopator terms it "the sin that is born with mankind." Plato denominates it "natural wickedness," and Aristotle "the natural repugnance of man's temper to reason." Cicero declares that "men are brought into life by Nature as a step-mother, with a naked, frail, and infirm body, and with a soul prone to divers lusts." Seneca observes, "We are born in such a condition that we are not subject to fewer disorders of the mind than of the body; all vices are in men, though they do not break out in every one." Propertius says that "every body has a vice to which he is inclined by nature." Juvenal asserts that "nature, unchangeably fixed, runs back to wickedness." Horace declares that "no man is free from vices, and he is the best man who is oppressed with the least." He adds that "mankind rush into wickedness, and always desire what is forbidden;" that "youth has the softness of wax to receive vicious impressions, and the hardness of rock to resist virtuous admonitions;" that "we are mad enough to attack Heaven itself, and our repeated crimes do not suffer the God of Heaven to lay aside his wrathful thunderbolts." This testimony of individual experience is verified by the general history of mankind. All the laws and institutions of society are founded on the principle that mankind are prone to wrong, infirm of purpose in all that is good, and that every possible restraint is needed to prevent the overbreaking tide of evil and crime. When we read the history of communities and of nations, it is one continued record of selfishness, avarice, injustice, revenge, and cruelty. Individuals seem equally plotting against the happiness of individuals, and rejoicing to work evils on society. Communities rise against communities, and nations dash against nations. Tyrants fill their dominions with sorrow, misery, and death; bloody heroes, followed by infuriate bands, spread havoc, ruin, and dismay through all their course, while superstition binds in chains, racks with tortures, and sacrifices its millions of victims.