Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven
with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly
to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon
Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not
more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the
knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth
into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into
of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As
therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose,
what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can
apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures,
and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly
better, he is the true warfaring Christian.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out
of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without
dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring
impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by
what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the
contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to
her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her
whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our
sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the
person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of
Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and
yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this
world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning