are based on a knowledge of character which does not quench the smoking flax, but gives time and opportunity for a repentant return to the path of virtue.[217] The world, too, would have been deprived of many a virtuous character, lost the advantage of many a noble deed, had prompt punishment for early sins been inflicted. There is, moreover, a soul of good in things evil; the careers of great tyrants have been prolonged, and the world has been the better for the movements which their tyranny compelled. Evil is a “dispensation of Providence” in Plutarch’s eyes, as in those of many modern Christians. “As the gall of the hyæna, and the rennet of the seal, both disgusting animals in other respects, possess qualities useful for medicinal purposes, so upon certain peoples who need severe correction God inflicts the implacable harshness of a tyrant or the intolerable severity of a magistrate, and does not take away their trouble and distress until they are purified of their sins.” Sometimes, too, the Deity delays His vengeance in order that it may take effect in a more strikingly appropriate manner.[218] But these external punishments are not the most terrible that can be inflicted on the sinner. It would be difficult, even in Christian literature, to find so striking a tribute to the power of conscience in inflicting its immaterial tortures on the criminal who has escaped material recompense. Plutarch bases his observations on this head on a repudiation of Plato’s statement[219] “that punishment is a state that follows upon injustice,” asserting, as he finds in Hesiod, that the two are contemporaneous and spring up from the same soil and root; a view which he supports by many conspicuous and terrible examples from history, the force of which may be summarized in the fine and truthful phrase—the antithetical effect of which would be destroyed by translation—οὐδὲ γηράσαντες ἐκολάσθησαν ἀλλ’ ἐγήρασαν κολαζόμενοι.[220] The conclusion which Plutarch arrives at by considering this aspect of the case is that “there is no necessity for any god, or any man, to inflict punishment on evildoers, but it is sufficient that their whole life is tormented and destroyed by their sense of their impiety;” and that the time cannot but come when the glamour and the tinselled glory of successful crime will be torn away, and nothing shall remain but the base and dreadful memory to torture awakening conscience with the pangs of an unquenchable remorse.[221]