ad element of a
diseased will is introduced, until the affecting notion is developed of
a fountain in man himself welling up the misery for ever, no idea of
misery could arise. Suffering is limited and transitory. What pain is
permanent in man? Even the deepest laceration of the human heart, that
which is inflicted by the loss of those who were the pulses of our
hearts, is soothed (if never wholly healed) by time. One agency of time
would avail for this effect were there no other. The features of the
individual whom we mourn grow dimmer and dimmer as time advances; and,
_pari passu_, the features of places and collateral objects and
associated persons from whom reverberated these afflicting reminiscences
of the lost object.

I return: Deliverer from what? From suffering or misery. But that was
not acknowledged, nor could have been, we could see no misery as a
hypothesis except in these two modes: First, as a radication in man by
means of something else, some third thing. Secondly, as a synthesis--as
a gathering under a principle which must act prior to the gathering in
order to provoke it. (The synthesis must be rendered possible and
challenged by the _a priori_ unity which otherwise constitutes that
unity.) As a metaphysical possibility evil was recognised through its
unfathomable nature. But this was because such a nature already
presupposed a God's nature, realizing his own ends, stepped in with
effect. For the highest form--the normal or transcendent form--of virtue
to a Pagan, was in the character of citizen. Indeed, the one sole or
affirmative form of virtue lay in this sole function, viz., of public,
of patriotic virtue. Since here only it was possible to introduce an
_additional_ good to the world. All other virtue, as of justice between
individual and individual, did but redress a previous error, sometimes
of the man himself, sometimes of social arrangement, sometimes of
accident. It was a _plus_ which balanced and compensated a pre-existing
_minus_--an action _in regressu_, which came back with prevailing power
upon an action _in progressu_. But to be a patriot was to fulfil a call
of the supererogatory heart--a great nisus of sympathy with the one sole
infinite, the sole practical infinite that man pre-Christian ever could
generate for his contemplation. Now, therefore, it followed that the
idea of virtue here only found its realization. Virtue, in fact, was not
derivatively or consequentially connected with