No man is more miserable than he that hath no adversity--that man is not tried whether he be good or bad: and God never crowns those virtues which are only faculties and dispositions; but every act of virtue is an ingredient into reward. And we see many children fairly planted, whose parts of nature were never drest by art, nor called from the furrows of their first possibilities by discipline and institution, and they dwell forever in ignorance, and converse with beasts; and yet if they had been drest and exercised, might have stood at the chairs of princes, or spoken parables amongst the rulers of cities. Our virtues are but in the seed when the grace of God comes upon us first; but this grace must be thrown into broken furrows, and must twice feel the cold and twice feel the heat, and be softened with storms and showers, and then it will arise into fruitfulness and harvests. And what is there in the world to distinguish virtues from dishonors, or the valor of Caesar from the softness of the Egyptian eunuchs, or that can make anything rewardable but the labor and the danger, the pain and the difficulty? Virtue could not be anything but sensuality if it were the entertainment of our senses and fond desires; and Apicius had been the noblest of all the Romans, if feeding and great appetite and despising the severities of temperance had been the work and proper employment of a wise man. But otherwise do fathers and otherwise do mothers handle their children. These soften them with kisses and imperfect noises, with the pap and breast-milk of soft endearments; they rescue them from tutors and snatch them from discipline; they desire to keep them fat and warm, and their feet dry, and their bellies full: and then the children govern, and cry, and prove fools and troublesome, so long as the feminine republic does endure.