Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/55

 *fore men abstract ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, which invite the better nature by their supreme excellence.

Plato enumerates four virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice. Professor Green interprets them in modern form, and maintains their fixed standard of excellence and universal application. Any modern analysis of the principles of conduct which contribute to health of soul and are favorable to success in life, would confirm the enumeration of the Greek virtues. Professor Green says: The Good Will is the will (1) to know what is true and to make what is beautiful; (2) to endure pain and fear; (3) to resist the allurements of pleasure; (4) to take for one's self and to give to others, not what one is inclined to, but what is due. Not only does he enjoin the spirit of justice, but the cultivation of moral courage, and, as contrasted with lazy ignorance, the growth in wisdom which is realization of virtue.

Wisdom played a peculiar and important part in the Greek ethics. Vice was ignorance, because the wise man could but live according to his best knowledge. And the Greeks, properly interpreted, were right. Did we see virtue in all its truth and beauty, and vice in all its deformity, we could but choose the best. Growth in wisdom was a gradual realization in the soul of the heavenly ideas that were the true heritage of man, and in this development the soul was gradually perfected. This beautiful and satisfying philosophy reappears to-day in some of the most ennobling systems of ethics the world has produced. It makes individual and race progress an increase in consciousness of the knowledge of truth and virtue, a revelation of the divine within us.