As the body is more firm in an encounter, the more stiffly and obstinately it applies itself to it, so is it with the soul.
But let us come to examples, which are the proper game of folks of such feeble force as myself; where we shall find that it is with pain as with stones, that receive a brighter or a duller lustre according to the foil they are set in, and that it has no more room in us than we are pleased to allow it: "Tantum doluerunt, quantum doloribus se inseruerunt." ["They suffered so much the more, by how much more they gave way to suffering."-- St.Augustin, De Civit.

Dei, i.

10.] We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon's lancet than of twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight.

The pains of childbearing, said by the physicians and by God himself to be great, and which we pass through with so many ceremonies--there are whole nations that make nothing of them.

I set aside the Lacedaemonian women, but what else do you find in the Swiss among our foot-soldiers, if not that, as they trot after their husbands, you see them to-day carry the child at their necks that they carried yesterday in their bellies?
The counterfeit Egyptians we have amongst us go themselves to wash theirs, so soon as they come into the world, and bathe in the first river they meet.