The English word "temperance" (particularly in its local association with agitation regarding use of intoxicating liquors) is a poor substitute for the Greek _sophrosyne_ which, through the Latin _temperantia_, it represents. The Athenian Greek was impressed with the fact that just as there are lawless, despotically ruled, and self-governed communities, so there are lawless, and servile, and self-ruled individuals. Whenever there is a self-governed soul, there is a happy blending of the authority of reason with the force of appetite. The individual's diverse nature is tempered into a living harmony of desire and intelligence. Reason governs not as a tyrant from without, but as a guide to which the impulses and emotions are gladly responsive. Such a well-attuned nature, as far from asceticism on one side as from random indulgence on the other, represented the ideal of what was fair and graceful in character, an ideal embodied in the notion of _sophrosyne_. This was a _whole-mindedness_ which resulted from the happy furtherance of all the elements of human nature under the self-accepted direction of intelligence. It implied an _æsthetic_ view of character; of harmony in structure and rhythm in action. It was the virtue of judgment exercised in the estimate of pleasures:--since it is the agreeable, the pleasant, which gives an end excessive hold upon us. =Roman Temperantia.=--The Roman conceived this virtue under the term _temperantia_, which conveys the same idea, but accommodated to the Roman genius. It is connected with the word _tempus_, time, which is connected also with a root meaning divide, distribute; it suggests a consecutive orderliness of behavior, a freedom from excessive and reckless action, first this way, and then that. It means seemliness, decorum, decency. It was "moderation," not as quantity of indulgence, but as a moderating of each act in a series by the thought of other and succeeding acts--keeping each in sequence with others in a whole. The idea of time involves time to think; the sobering second thought expressed in seriousness and gravity. The negative side, the side of restraint, of inhibition, is strong, and functions for the consistent calm and gravity of life. =Christian Purity.=--Through the Christian influence, the connotation which is marked in the notion of control of sexual appetite, became most obvious--_purity_. Passion is not so much something which disturbs the harmony of man's nature, or which interrupts its orderliness, as it is something which defiles the purity of spiritual nature. It is the grossness, the contamination of appetite which is insisted upon, and temperance is the maintenance of the soul spotless and unsullied.