POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY seen more than a face (U, 110) In principle, marriage is lifelong, but adultery may break a marriage and in that case the innocent, but not the adulterous, spouse is allowed to remarry Adultery is severely punished and if repeated incurs the death penalty On rare occasions, divorce by consent is permitted Apart from family law, the Utopians have few laws and no lawyers Their laws are stated simply enough to need no interpretation, and they think it better that a man should plead his own case and tell the same story to the judge that he would tell to his own attorney The Utopians are not paciWsts, but they regard war as a matter of necessity rather than of glory: it is justiWed in order to repel invaders or to liberate peoples oppressed by tyranny If a Utopian is killed or maimed anywhere, they send an embassy to determine the facts and demand the surrender of wrongdoers; if this is refused, they forthwith declare war But they prefer to win a war by bribery or assassination rather than by battle and bloodshed; if a pitched battle abroad cannot be avoided they employ foreign mercenaries to Wght it for them In wars of defence in the homeland, husbands and wives stand in battle side by side ‘It is a great reproach and dishonesty for the husband to come home without his wife, or the wife without her husband’ (U, 125) The Wnal chapter of Hythlodaye’s account concerns Utopian religion Most Utopians worship a ‘godly power, unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the capacity and reach of man’s wit’, which they call ‘the father of all’ Utopians not impose their religious beliefs on others, and toleration is the rule A Christian convert who proselytized with hellWre sermons was arrested, tried, and banished, ‘not as a despiser of religion, but as a seditious person and raiser up of dissension among the people’ (U, 133) But toleration has limits: anyone who professes that the soul perishes with the body is condemned to silence and forbidden to hold public oYce Suicide on private initiative is not permitted, but the incurably and painfully sick may, after counselling, take their own lives Reluctance to die is taken as a sign of a guilty conscience, but those who die cheerfully are cremated with songs of joy When a good man dies ‘no part of his life is so oft or gladly talked of, as his merry death’ There are priests in Utopia—persons of extraordinary holiness ‘and therefore very few’ There are thirteen, in fact, in every city, elected by popular vote in secret ballot Women as well as men may become priests, but only if they are widows of a certain age The male priests marry the 280