the virtuous man does good to mankind. St. Paul was right to tell you
that charity prevails over faith and hope.

But shall only those that are useful to one's fellow-creature be
admitted as virtues? How can I admit any others? We live in society;
really, therefore, the only things that are good for us are those that
are good for society. A recluse will be sober, pious; he will be clad in
hair-cloth; he will be a saint: but I shall not call him virtuous until
he has done some act of virtue by which other men have profited. So long
as he is alone, he is doing neither good nor evil; for us he is nothing.
If St. Bruno brought peace to families, if he succoured want, he was
virtuous; if he fasted, prayed in solitude, he was a saint. Virtue among
men is an interchange of kindness; he who has no part in this
interchange should not be counted. If this saint were in the world, he
would doubtless do good; but so long as he is not in the world, the
world will be right in refusing him the title of virtuous; he will be
good for himself and not for us.

But, you say to me, if a recluse is a glutton, a drunkard, given to
secret debauches with himself, he is vicious; he is virtuous, therefore,
if he has the opposite qualities. That is what I cannot agree: he is a
very disagreeable fellow if he has the faults you mention; but he is not
vicious, wicked, punishable as regards society to whom these infamies do
no harm. It is to be presumed that were he to return to society he would
do harm there, that he would be very vicious; and it is even more
probable that he would be a wicked man, than it is sure that the other
temperate and chaste recluse would be a virtuous man, for in society
faults increase, and good qualities diminish.

A much stronger objection is made; Nero, Pope Alexander VI., and other
monsters of this species, have bestowed kindnesses; I answer hardily
that on that day they were virtuous.

A few theologians say that the divine emperor Antonine was not virtuous;
that he was a stubborn Stoic who, not content with commanding men,
wished further to be esteemed by them; that he attributed to himself the
good he did to the human race; that all his life he was just, laborious,
beneficent through vanity, and that he only deceived men through his
virtues. "My God!" I exclaim. "Give us often rogues like him!"

_WHY?_

Why does one hardly ever do the tenth part of the good one might do?

Why in half Europe do girls pra