cause it wants to keep its own sweet sense of
self-righteousness unimpaired. Mrs. Browning gives us a clear example of
this "harmless life, she called a virtuous life," in the case of the
frigid aunt of "Aurora Leigh":

From that day, she did
Her duty to me (I appreciate it
In her own word as spoken to herself),
Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,
But measured always. She was generous, bland,
More courteous than was tender, gave me still
The first place,--as if fearful that God's saints
Would look down suddenly and say, 'Herein
You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.'

THE PENALTY.

+Just as continuity in virtue strengthens and unifies character and
makes life a consistent and harmonious whole; so self-indulgence in
vicious pleasures disorganizes a man's life and eats the heart out of
him.+--Corrupt means literally broken. The corrupt man has no soundness,
no solidity, no unity in his life. He cannot respect himself. Others
cannot put confidence in him. There is no principle binding each part of
his life to every other, and holding the whole together. The other words
by which we describe such a life all spring from the same conception. We
call such a person dissolute; and dissolute means literally separated,
loosed, broken apart. We call him dissipated; and dissipated means
literally scattered, torn apart, thrown away.

These forms of statement all point to the same fact, that the
unscrupulous pleasure-seeker, the selfish, vicious man has no
consistent, continuous, coherent life whatever. "The unity of his
being," as Janet says, "is lost in the multiplicity of his sensations."
His life is a mere series of disconnected fragments. There is no growth,
no development. There is nothing on which he can look with approval; no
consistent career of devotion to worthy objective ends, the fruits of
which can be witnessed in the improvement of the world in which he has
lived, and stored up in the character which he has formed.

CHAPTER XXII.

God.

In the last chapter we saw that the particular objects and duties which
make up our environment and moral life are not so many separate affairs;
but all have a common relation to the self, and its realization. We saw
that this common relation to the self gives unity to the world of
objects, the life of duty, the nature of virtue, and the character which
crowns right living.

The