of the humblest faults and most hidden virtues of ordinary life.
Many a youthful Marcus Aurelius is still about us; many a Macbeth,
who never stirs from his room. However imperfect our conception of
virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment's forgetfulness
exposes us to all the malignant forces from without. The simplest
lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul,
may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery
on the marketplace. And from the moment that my inner liberty is
threatened, destiny prowls around my external liberty as stealthily
as a beast of prey that has long been tracking its victim.

77. Can we conceive a situation in life wherein a man who is truly
wise and noble can be made to suffer as profoundly as the man who
follows evil? In this world it is far more certain that vice will be
punished, than that virtue will meet with reward; yet we must bear
in mind that it is the habit of crime to shriek aloud beneath its
punishment, whereas virtue rewards itself in the silence that is the
walled garden of its happiness. Evil drags horrid catastrophe behind
it; but an act of virtue is only a silent offering to the
profoundest laws of life; and therefore, doubtless, does the balance
of mighty justice seem more ready to incline beneath deeds of
darkness than beneath those of light. But if we can scarcely believe
that "happiness in crime" be possible, have we more warrant for
faith in the "unhappiness of virtue"? We know that the executioner
can stretch Spinoza on the rack, and that terrible disease will
spare Antoninus Pius no more than Goneril or Regan; but pain such as
this belongs to the animal, not the human, side of man. Wisdom has
indeed sent science, the youngest of her sisters, into the realm of
destiny, with the mission to bring the zone of physical suffering
within ever-narrowing limits; but there are inaccessible regions