Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/86

 Sophist turned round upon his career, and determined to lead a virtuous life, he joined the ranks of those who professed philosophy.

One of the most frequently recurrent signs of the essential love of virtue exhibited by this age is the constant and strenuous insistence that practice must conform to profession; and that hypocrisy is almost in the condition of a cardinal vice. It may, of course, be asserted that the passionate eagerness displayed touching the importance of being true in act to the explicit utterances of Philosophy is but a sign of conscious weakness in well-doing; and that a truer virtue would have given effect to itself without all this noisy preaching. But a recognition of one's own feebleness has subsequently become one of the most lauded elements of the saintly character, and it is given to very few to blossom gently and naturally into that goodness which does neither strive nor cry. Juvenal's diatribes against the Egnatii of Rome are not very different in language, and hardly different at all in spirit, from the attacks of New Testament writers on hypocritical members of the Churches. So far as Greece was concerned, this love of sincerity was but a return—from a somewhat distant lapse—to the ideal of personal openness presented in the famous words of Achilles:—