not moral suffering the most tyrannical weapon in the armoury of destiny?  Our happiness mainly depends on the freedom that reigns within us; a freedom that widens with every good deed, and contracts beneath acts of evil.  Not metaphorically, but literally, does Marcus Aurelius free himself each time he discovers a new truth in indulgence, each time that he pardons, each time he reflects.  Still less of a metaphor is it to declare that Macbeth enchains himself anew with every fresh crime.  And if this be true of the great crimes of kings and the virtues of heroes, it is no less true of the humblest faults and most hidden virtues of ordinary life.  Many a youthful Marcus Aurelius is still about us; many a Macbeth, who never stirs from his room.  However imperfect our conception of virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment’s forgetfulness exposes us to all the malignant forces from without.  The simplest lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul, may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery on the marketplace.  And from the moment that my inner liberty is threatened, destiny prowls around my external liberty as stealthily as a beast of prey that has long been tracking its victim.

77.  Can we conceive a situation in life wherein a man who is truly wise and noble can be made to suffer as profoundly as the man who follows evil?  In this world it is far more certain that vice will be punished, than that virtue will meet with reward; yet we must bear in mind that it is the habit of crime to shriek aloud beneath its punishment, whereas virtue rewards itself in the silence that is the walled garden of its happiness.  Evil drags horrid catastrophe behind it; but an act of virtue is only a silent offering to the profoundest laws of life; and therefore, doubtless, does the balance of mighty justice seem more ready to incline beneath deeds of darkness than beneath those of light.  But if we can scarcely believe that “happiness in crime” be possible, have we more warrant for faith in the “unhappiness of virtue”?  We know that the executioner can stretch Spinoza on the rack, and that terrible disease will spare Antoninus Pius no more than Goneril or Regan; but pain such as this belongs to the animal, not the human, side of man.  Wisdom has indeed sent science, the youngest of her sisters, into the realm of destiny, with the mission to bring the zone of physical suffering within ever-narrowing limits; but there are inaccessible regions within that realm, where disaster ever will rule.  Some stricken ones there will always be, victims to irreducible injustice; and yet will the true wisdom, in the midst of its sorrow, only be fortified thereby, only gain in self-reliance and humanity all that it, may lose in more mystic qualities.  We become truly just only when it is finally borne home to us that we must search within ourselves for our model of justice.  Again, it is the injustice of destiny that restores man to his