purity is as great before me as he who celebrates ten thousand adorations.…”[367] “Render the earth fertile, cover it with flowers and with fruits; multiply the springs in the places where there is no grass.”[368] This same maxim of the pardon of offences and those which decree to return good for evil, and to do unto others what we would that they should do unto us, is found in many of the Oriental writings. One reads in the distichs of Hafiz this beautiful passage: Learn of the sea-shell to love thine enemy, and to fill with pearls the hand thrust out to harm thee. Be not less generous than the hard rock; make resplendent with precious stones, the arm which rends thy side. Mark thou yonder tree assailed by a shower of stones; upon those who throw them it lets fall only delicious fruits or perfumed flowers. The voice of all nature calls aloud to us: shall man be the only one refusing to heal the hand which is wounded in striking him? To bless the one who offends him?[369] The evangelical precept paraphrased by Hafiz is found in substance in a discourse of Lysias; it is clearly expressed by Thales and Pittacus; Kong-Tse taught it in the same words as Jesus; finally one finds in the _Arya_, written more than three centuries before our era, these lines which seem made expressly to inculcate the maxim and depict the death of the righteous man: The duty of a good man, even at the moment of his destruction, consists not only in forgiving but even in a desire of benefiting his destroyer; as the Sandal-tree, in the instant of its overthrow sheds perfume on the ax which fells; and he would triumph in repeating the verse of Sadi who represents a return of good for good as a slight reciprocity, but says to the virtuous man, “confer benefits on him who has injured thee.”[370]