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Enthusiasm also, as I think, leans to virtue's side, or, at least, if it be a fault, of all faults it is the prettiest. But then, to partake at all of virtue or even to be in any degree pretty, the enthusiasm must be true. Bad coin is known from good by the ring of it, and so is bad enthusiasm.
She is valour's life and virtue's love, justice's honour and mercy's glory. She beats down castles, fires ships, wades through the sea, and walks through the world. She makes wisdom her guide and will her servant, reason her companion and honour her mistress. She is a blessing in Nature and a beauty in reason, a grace in invention and a glory in action.
Forsaking those that are atheists, those that transgress virtue's limits, those that are of wicked souls, those that live in sinfulness, betake thyself to knowledge reverencing those that are virtuous. Lust and temptation are even like sharks in the river of life; the waters are the five senses.
Let her not borrow from the laws the sword To rid her of her hated enemy; Let her not clothe in this religious garb The bloody daring of licentious might; Let not these juggling tricks deceive the world. Though she may murder me, she cannot judge me: Let her no longer strive to join the fruits Of vice with virtue's fair and angel show; But let her dare to seem the thing she is.
"'There lived of yore an old swan on the sea-coast. Ever speaking of morality, but otherwise in his conduct, he used to instruct the feathery tribe. "Practise ye virtue and forego sin," these were the words that other truthful birds, O Bhishma, constantly heard him utter. And the other oviparous creatures ranging the sea, it hath been heard by us, O Bhishma use for virtue's sake to bring him food.
A raggedly dressed man walking in a dark, lonely street may be honesty itself. Yet rags, even when worn for virtue's sake, are a dubious assurance of virtue. They are always ominous to one sworn to protect property and uphold the law.
Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward.
To a woman of society they offer another, more noble yet not less dangerous the attraction of reforming them. It is rare that virtuous women do not fall into the error of believing that it is for virtue's sake alone such men love them. These, in brief, were the secret sympathies whose slight tendrils intertwined, blossomed, and flowered little by little in this soul, as tender as it was pure.
But, looking back to-day over it all, if it was a fault, it was one that leant to virtue's side. He was wonderfully unsuspicious: and so far as his fellow men were concerned, Chinese or Westerns, the mental process which he almost invariably employed was to try to find out what good there was in a man. And now one loves him all the more for such a Christlike spirit. Dr.
The object of this rambling preamble is to win from the reader a morsel of genial fellow-feeling towards the human frailty which I propose to examine and lay bare before him, trusting that he will treat it neither with the haughty disdain of the immaculate, nor the grim charity of the "miserable sinner:" that he may even, when sighing over it as a failing, yet kindly remember that, in comparison with many others, it is a failing that leans to virtue's side.
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