losophers, said that "we
should every night call ourselves to account. What infirmity have I
mastered to-day? what passion opposed? what temptation resisted? what
virtue acquired?" and then he follows with the profound truth that "our
vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the
shrift." If you cannot at first control your anger, learn to control
your tongue, which, like fire, is a good servant, but a hard master.

It does no good to get angry. Some sins have a seeming compensation or
apology, a present gratification of some sort, but anger has none. A man
feels no better for it. It is really a torment, and when the storm of
passion has cleared away, it leaves one to see that he has been a fool.
And he has made himself a fool in the eyes of others too.

The wife of Socrates, Xanthippe, was a woman of a most fantastical and
furious spirit. At one time, having vented all the reproaches upon
Socrates her fury could suggest, he went out and sat before the door.
His calm and unconcerned behavior but irritated her so much the more;
and, in the excess of her rage, she ran upstairs and emptied a vessel
upon his head, at which he only laughed and said that "so much thunder
must needs produce a shower." Alcibiades, his friend, talking with him
about his wife, told him he wondered how he could bear such an
everlasting scold in the same house with him. He replied, "I have so
accustomed myself to expect it, that it now offends me no more than the
noise of carriages in the street."

It is said of Socrates, that whether he was teaching the rules of an
exact morality, whether he was answering his corrupt judges, or was
receiving sentence of death, or swallowing the poison, he was still the
same man; that is to say, calm, quiet, undisturbed, intrepid--in a word,
wise to the last.

"It is not enough to have great qualities," says La Rochefoucauld; "we
should also have the management of them." No man can call himself
educated until every voluntary muscle obeys his will.

"You ask whether it would not be manly to resent a great injury," said
Eardley Wilmot; "I answer that it would be manly to resent it, but it
would be Godlike to forgive it."

"He who, with strong passions, remains chaste; he who, keenly sensitive,
with manly power of indignation in him, can be provoked, and yet
restrain himself and forgive--these are strong men, the spiritual
heroes."

To feel provoked or exasperated at a trifle, when the ner