CHRISTIAN. 'Judgment,' 'prudent'--these words show how wide by a whole hemisphere you are of the truth. It is your will that He applies His correction to. ROMAN. 'Will!' why I've none but peaceable and lawful designs, I assure you. Oh! I begin to see. You think me a partner with those pirates that we just spoke to. CHRISTIAN. Not at all, my friend. I speak not of designs or intentions. What I mean is, the source of all desires--what I would call your wills, your whole moral nature. ROMAN (_bridling_). Ahem! I hope Roman nature is quite as little in need of improvement as any other. There are the Cretans; they held up their heads. Accordingly they had their fire institutions, and that true institution against bribery and luxury, and all such stuff. They fancied themselves impregnable. Why, bless you! even Marcus Tullius, that was a prosing kind of man and rather peevish about such things, could not keep in the truth. 'Why, Cato, my boy,' says he, 'you talk.' And to hear you, bribery and luxury would not leave one a stick to fight for. Why, now, these same Cretans--lord! we took the conceit out of them in twenty-five minutes. No more time, I assure you, did it cost three of our cohorts to settle the whole lot of them. CHRISTIAN. My friend, you are more and more in the dark. What I mean is not present in your senses, but a disease. ROMAN. Oh, a disease! that's another thing. But where? CHRISTIAN. Why, it affects the brain and the heart. ROMAN. Well, now, one at a time. Take the brain--we have a disease, and we treat it with white hellebore. There may be a better way. But answer me this. If you are generally affected, what right have you to bring, as you are supposing, a diseased brain to a sound one? We Romans are all sound--sound as a bell. Then Christian goes on to the history of the fall. But the whole would be self-baffled and construed away from want of sin as the antithesis of holiness.