Largior hic campos æther, & lumine vestit,
Purpure, solemque suum sua sidera morunt.
XL. The path of vice is very differently formed, and may be compared to a passage or cave, which, according to the naturalists, is fabricated as a place of safe retreat by the Rat of India. This sagacious animal, knowing the enmity the dragon bears him, and knowing also the insufficiency of his own strength to resist him, not only defends himself, but conquers his enemy by the following stratagem. He makes two entrances to his cave, the one small and proportioned to the bulk of his own body, the other wider at the surface, but which he draws narrower by degrees, till towards the other end it is but just wide enough to admit of his passing through. The use of this place is as follows: When the little animal finds himself pursued by that voracious beast, he flies to his cave, which he enters at the wide mouth, not doubting but the dragon will follow him, who eager for his prey, the large aperture being sufficiently wide to admit his whole body, plunges in, but as it insensibly becomes narrower and narrower, the dragon, who presses violently on, finds himself in the end so straitened, as not to be able either to retreat, or advance; the rat, as soon as he perceives this, sallies out of the narrow passage, and in the rear of the dragon, entering the wide one, revenges himself upon him much at his leisure, converting him into a regale for his appetite, and food for his resentment.
XLI. The stratagem of this little animal exactly resembles that which the devil practises upon men. He displays to him the road of vice, very broad and commodious at the entrance; the unhappy man, lured by this appearance, enters without suspicion, and in the consequence becomes a prey to his criminal pleasures. The road, by little and little, grows narrower; one care oppresses him on one side, and another on the other; sickness and old age, which are very nearly allied together, come on; his limbs begin to contract, and the use of them to forsake him; fear, solicitude, grief and heaviness, press upon him more and more every day, till he is put in such a strait, that even the soul with its spiritual nature is unable to ruminate or reflect on: by this progression, the sinner, in the end, arrives at the summit of anguish, and at that unhappy station, from whence it is impossible to recede, ubi nulla est redemptio, and where he will be eternally food for that ravenous serpent, whose voracity and thirst of blood is never satiated: Mors depascet eos; which Cardinal Hugo expounds, Diabolus depascet eos.
XLII. This remarkable difference and opposition between virtue and vice, was not hid from the antients, for the light of natural reason was sufficient to acquire this knowledge; and Virgil has painted beautifully, the distinction between the one and the other path, in the following verses:
Nam via virtutis dextrum petit ardua collem
Difficilemque aditum primum spectantibus offert,
Sed requiem præbet fessis in vertice summo.
Molle ostentat iter via lata; sed ultima meta
Præcipitat captos, volvitque per ardua saxa.