to make the most of it--to observe what things
do _bona fide_ tend to long life and comfort, and to act accordingly? All
animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy
it--and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will
allow. He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take
care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. If Mr
Pontifex is to be blamed it is for not having eaten and drunk less and
thus suffered less from his liver, and lived perhaps a year or two
longer.

Goodness is naught unless it tends towards old age and sufficiency of
means. I speak broadly and _exceptis excipiendis_. So the psalmist
says, "The righteous shall not lack anything that is good." Either this
is mere poetical license, or it follows that he who lacks anything that
is good is not righteous; there is a presumption also that he who has
passed a long life without lacking anything that is good has himself also
been good enough for practical purposes.

Mr Pontifex never lacked anything he much cared about. True, he might
have been happier than he was if he had cared about things which he did
not care for, but the gist of this lies in the "if he had cared." We
have all sinned and come short of the glory of making ourselves as
comfortable as we easily might have done, but in this particular case Mr
Pontifex did not care, and would not have gained much by getting what he
did not want.

There is no casting of swine's meat before men worse than that which
would flatter virtue as though her true origin were not good enough for
her, but she must have a lineage, deduced as it were by spiritual
heralds, from some stock with which she has nothing to do. Virtue's true
lineage is older and more respectable than any that can be invented for
her. She springs from man's experience concerning his own well-being--and
this, though not infallible, is still the least fallible thing we have. A
system which cannot stand without a better foundation than this must have
something so unstable within itself that it will topple over on whatever
pedestal we place it.

The world has long ago settled that morality and virtue are what bring
men peace at the last. "Be virtuous," says the copy-book, "and you will
be happy." Surely if a reputed virtue fails often in this respect it is
only an insidious form of vice, and if a reputed vice brings no very
serious mischief on a man's later ye