other for the little while we are together here. Need we be so
cocksure that our present list of virtues and vices is the only possibly
correct and complete one? Is the kind, unselfish man necessarily a
villain because he does not always succeed in suppressing his natural
instincts? Is the narrow-hearted, sour-souled man, incapable of a
generous thought or act, necessarily a saint because he has none?
Have we not--we unco guid--arrived at a wrong method of estimating our
frailer brothers and sisters? We judge them, as critics judge books, not
by the good that is in them, but by their faults. Poor King David! What
would the local Vigilance Society have had to say to him?

Noah, according to our plan, would be denounced from every teetotal
platform in the country, and Ham would head the Local Vestry poll as a
reward for having exposed him. And St. Peter! weak, frail St. Peter,
how lucky for him that his fellow-disciples and their Master were not as
strict in their notions of virtue as are we to-day.

Have we not forgotten the meaning of the word "virtue"? Once it stood
for the good that was in a man, irrespective of the evil that might lie
there also, as tares among the wheat. We have abolished virtue, and for
it substituted virtues. Not the hero--he was too full of faults--but the
blameless valet; not the man who does any good, but the man who has not
been found out in any evil, is our modern ideal. The most virtuous thing
in nature, according to this new theory, should be the oyster. He is
always at home, and always sober. He is not noisy. He gives no trouble
to the police. I cannot think of a single one of the Ten Commandments
that he ever breaks. He never enjoys himself, and he never, so long as
he lives, gives a moment's pleasure to any other living thing.

I can imagine the oyster lecturing a lion on the subject of morality.

"You never hear me," the oyster might say, "howling round camps and
villages, making night hideous, frightening quiet folk out of their
lives. Why don't you go to bed early, as I do? I never prowl round
the oyster-bed, fighting other gentlemen oysters, making love to lady
oysters already married. I never kill antelopes or missionaries. Why
can't you live as I do on salt water and germs, or whatever it is that I
do live on? Why don't you try to be more like me?"

An oyster has no evil passions, therefore we say he is a virtuous fish.
We never ask ourselves--"Has he any good passions?" A lion'