6. Meekness is moderation in anger, and is or should be the virtue of
all men. Clemency is moderation in punishment, and is the virtue of
men in office, who bear the sword or the rod.

7. As regards the vices opposite to Temperance, an important
distinction is to be drawn between him who sins by outburst of passion
and him whose very principles are corrupt. [Footnote 8] The former in
doing evil acknowledges it to be evil, and is prone to repent of it
afterwards: the latter has lost his belief in virtue, and his
admiration for it: he drinks in iniquity like water, with no
after-qualms; he glories in his shame. The former is reclaimable, the
latter is reprobate: his intellect as well as his heart is vitiated
and gone bad. If there were no miracles, he would be a lost man: but
God can work miracles in the moral as in the physical order: in that
there is hope for him.

[Footnote 8: See the note in _Aquinas Ethicus_, Vol. I., pp. 170,
171.]

8. A nation need not be virtuous in the great bulk of her citizens, to
be great in war and in dominion, in laws, in arts, and in literature:
but the bulk of the people must possess at least the sense and
appreciation of virtue in order to such national greatness. When that
sense is lost, the nation is undone and become impotent, for art no
less than for empire. Thus the Greece of Pericles and of Phidias fell,
to be "living Greece no more."

9. As in other moral matters, no hard and fast line of division exists
between sinning from passion and sinning on principle, but cases of
the one shade into cases of the others, and by frequent indulgence of