salt a thousand years before it turns them into pillars of society.

As for virtue, then, how is it to be achieved? Merely by blackening
the rest of the world, we cannot hope to make ourselves white. Modern
writers tell us that we cannot make ourselves white even by blackening
ourselves. They denounce the sense of sin as a sin, and tell us that
there is nothing of which we should repent except repentance. We need
not stay to discuss this point. We know well enough that, so long as
the human intellect (to leave the human conscience out of the
question) survives, men will be burdened with the sense of
imperfection and think enviously of the nobility of Epaminondas or
Julius Cæsar or St Francis of Assisi. For we have to count even Julius
Cæsar among the virtuous, though the scandalmongers would not have it
so. His vices may have made him bald and brought about his
assassination. But he had the heroic virtues--courage and generosity
and freedom from vindictiveness. When we read how he wept at the death
of his great enemy, and how "from the man who brought him Pompey's
head he turned away with loathing, as from an assassin," we bow before
the nobility of his character and realise that he was something more
than a stern man and an adulterer. Pompey, too, had this gift of
virtue--this capacity for turning away from foul means of besting his
enemies. When he had captured Perpenna in Spain, the latter offered
him a magnificent story of a plot, the knowledge of which would have
put the lives of many leading Romans in his power. "Perpenna, who had
come into possession of the papers of Sertorius, offered," says
Plutarch, "to produce letters from the chief men of Rome, who had
desired to subvert the existing order and change the form of
government, and had therefore invited Sertorius into Italy. Pompey,
therefore, fearing that this might stir up greater wars than those now
ended, put Perpenna to death and burned the letters without even