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February 3 - February 18, 2025
No matter what, adhering to rules is much easier than exercising wisdom.
Virtue requires judgment, and judgment requires prudence. Prudence is wisdom in practice.
One attains the virtue of temperance when one’s appetites have been shaped such that one’s very desires are in proper order and proportion.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”12 In other words, it was an age of polar extremes.
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Scripture admonishes (Matt. 22:39).
Plato says that justice is the proper balancing or proportioning of all parts of the soul.
Carton’s last words as he approaches Madame Guillotine to rest his neck in her eternal embrace are fitting: “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Afterward, those who gazed on the spectacle of injustice said of Carton “that it was the peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there.”
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. . . . It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.56
Moral strength is one kind of courage. Perhaps it’s the foundation of all courage.
Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence.
The Road
Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity
“Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink.”10 No pride could be more blinding than the kind that makes you think your pigs don’t stink.
