The sun rises for the evil also.
God has given certain benefactions to all men, and from which none are excluded.
Who is so wretched, so despised, who born to so hard and sorrowful a destiny that he has never perceived the munificence of the gods? Seek out even those who bewail their fate and who are always complaining, you will not find among the entire number one who has not experienced the beneficence of heaven; there is not one for whom there has not flowed something from the most inexhaustible of all fountains.
Add, now, that external circumstances do not coerce the gods, but their sempiternal will is their law. They have established an order of events which they do not change. The gods never repent of their first purpose.
Beneficence consists not in what is done or given, but in the spirit of the doer or giver.
It is a most glorious work to save even the unwilling and refractory.
The door to virtue is closed to no one; it is open to all, admits all; virtue invites everybody, free-born, freedmen, slaves, kings and exiles. It selects neither class nor condition, it seeks the man only.
Nature directs us to do good to all men whether bond or free, free-born or emancipated slaves. Wherever there is a human being, there is a place for beneficence.
He who reasons thus (like Epicurus), does not hear the voices of supplicants and the prayers offered everywhere, in public and private, with hands outstretched toward heaven. This could not be, nor is it possible that all men should have willingly consented to the folly of addressing deaf divinities and powerless gods, if they had not recognized their benefactions, sometimes given spontaneously, sometimes in answer to prayer, always great, timely, averting by their intervention impending disasters.