4. 'In the first place, true honour, though it be a different principle from religion, is that which produces the same effects. The lines of action, though drawn from different parts, terminate in the same point. Religion embraces virtue as it is enjoined by the laws of God: Honour, as it is graceful and ornamental to human nature.
5. 'The religious man fears, the man of honor scorns to do an ill action. The former considers vice as something that is beneath him, the other as something that is offensive to the Divine Being. The one as what is unbecoming, the other as what forbidden. Thus Seneca speaks in the natural and genuine language of a man of honor, when he declares that were there no God to see or punish vice, he would not commit it, because it is of so mean, so base, and so vile a nature.
6. 'I shall conclude this head with the description of honor in the part of young Juba.
Honour's a sacred tie, the law of kings,
The noble mind's distinguishing perfection,
That aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her,
And imitates her actions where she is not.
It ought not to be sported with.— CATO.
7. 'In the second place we are to consider those who have mistaken notions of honor, and these are such as establish any thing to themselves for a point of honor which is contrary either to the laws of God, or of their country; who think it is more honourable to revenge than to forgive an injury; who make no scruple of telling a lie, but would put any man to death that accuses them of it: who are more careful to guard their reputation by their courage than by their virtue.
8. 'True fortitude is indeed so becoming in human nature, that he who wants it scarce deserves the name of a man; but we find several who so much abuse this notion that they place the whole idea of honor in a kind of brutal courage; by which means we have had many among us who have called themselves men of honour, that would have been a disgrace to a gibbet.
9. In a word, the man who sacrifices any duty of a reasonable creature to a prevailing mode of fashion, who looks upon any thing as honourable that is displeasing to his Maker, or destructive to society, who thinks himself obliged by this principle to the practice of some virtues and not of others, is by no means to be reckoned among true men of honor.
10. Timogenes was a lively instance of one actuated by false honor. Timogenes would smile at a man's jest who ridiculed his Maker, and at the same time run a man thro' the body that spoke ill of his friend. Timogenes would have scorned to have betrayed a secret, that was intrusted with him, though the fate of his country depended upon the discovery of it.
11. Timogenes took away the life of a young fellow in a duel, for having spoken ill of Belinda, a lady whom he himself had seduced in his youth, and betrayed into want and ignominy. To close his character, Timogenes, after having ruined several poor tradesmen's families, who had trusted him, sold his estate to satisfy his creditors; but, like a man of honor, disposed of all the money he could make of it, in paying off his play-debts, or, to speak in his own language, his debts of honor.
12. In the third place, we are to consider those persons, who treat this principle as chimerical, and turn it into ridicule. Men who are professedly of no honour, are of a more profligate and abandoned nature, than even those who are actuated by false notions of it, as there is more hope of a heretic than of an atheist. These sons of infamy consider honor with old Syphax, in the play before mentioned, as a fine imaginary notion, that leads astray young unexperienced men, and draws them into real mischief, while they are engaged in the pursuits of a shadow.