necessary and even perverse."

"But," I said, "there are a good many people who attain to a sensible,
well-balanced kind of temperance, after perhaps a few failures, from a
purely prudential motive. What is the worth of that?"

"Very small indeed," said my teacher. "In fact, the prudential morality,
based on motives of health and reputation and success, is a thing that
has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage. The strange
catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one
act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his
life--a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece
of quixotic generosity--are often a symptom of a great effort of the
soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done
for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming
influence on the soul. One has to remember how terribly the heavenly
values are obscured upon earth by the body, its needs and its desires;
and current morality of a cautious and sensible kind is often worse than
worthless, because it produces a kind of self-satisfaction, which is the
hardest thing to overcome."

"But," I said, "in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so
often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is
useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the
ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties. What is one to
make of that?"

"It is a difficult matter," he replied; "one does indeed, in the lives
of great moralists, see sometimes that their work is vitiated by
perverse and fantastic preferences, which they exalt out of all
proportion to their real value. But for all that, it is better to be on
the side of the saints; for they are gifted with the sort of instinctive
appreciation of the beauty of high morality of which I spoke.
Unselfishness, purity, peacefulness seem to them so beautiful and
desirable that they are constrained to practise them. While controversy,
bitterness, cruelty, meanness, vice, seem so utterly ugly and repulsive
that they cannot for an instant entertain even so much as a thought of
them."

"But if a man sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception," I
said, "what can he do? How is he to learn to love what he does not
admire and to abhor what he does not hate? It all seems so fatalistic,
so irresistible."

"If he discerns his lack," said my teacher with a smile, "he is probabl