for God and desire to do Him honour, can never be too intense:
"Blessing the Lord, exalt Him as much as you can: for He is above all
praise." (Ecclus. xliii. 33.)

7. The rule of the mean, then, is a human rule, for dealing with men,
and with human goods considered as means. It is a Greek rule: for the
Greeks were of all nations the fondest admirers of man and the things
of man. But when we ascend to God, we are out among the immensities
and eternities. The vastness of creation, the infinity of the
Creator,--there is no mode or measure there. In those heights the
Hebrew Psalmist loved to soar. Christianity, with its central dogma of
the Incarnation, is the meeting of Hebrew and Greek. That mystery
clothes the Lord God of hosts with the measured beauty, grace, and
truth, that man can enter into. But enough of this. Enough to show
that the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean is a highly suggestive and
wide-reaching doctrine beyond the sphere of Morals. It throws out one
great branch into Art, another into Theology.

8. The vicious extremes, on this side and on that of a virtue, are not
always conterminous with the virtue itself, but sometimes another and
more excellent virtue intervenes; as in giving we may pass from
justice to liberality, and only through passing the bounds of
liberality, do we arrive at the vicious extreme of prodigality. So
penitential fasting intervenes between temperance in food and undue
neglect of sustenance. But it is to be noted that the _central
virtue_, so to speak, as justice, sobriety, chastity, is for all
persons on all occasions: the more excellent _side-virtue_, as
liberality, or total abstinence, is for special occasions and special
classes of persons.