A principle that is attached to the very idea of the good, says to us that every moral agent deserves a reward when he does good, and a punishment when he does evil. This principle is universal and necessary: it is absolute. If this principle has not its application in this world, it must either be a lie, or this world is ordered ill. Now, it is a fact that the good is not always followed by happiness, nor evil always by unhappiness. Let us, in the first place, remark that if the fact exists, it is rare enough, and seems to present the character of an exception. Virtue is a struggle against passion; this struggle, full of dignity, is also full of pain; but, on one side, crime is condemned to much harder pains; on the other, those of virtue are of short duration; they are a necessary and almost always beneficent trial. Virtue has its pains, but the greatest happiness is still with it, as the greatest unhappiness is with crime; and such is the case in small and great, in the secret of the soul, and on the theatre of life, in the obscurest conditions and in the most conspicuous situations. Good and bad health are, after all, the greatest part of happiness or unhappiness. In this regard, compare temperance and its opposite, order and disorder, virtue and vice; I mean a temperance truly temperate, and not an atrabilarious asceticism, a rational virtue, and not a fierce virtue. The great physician Hufeland[252] remarks that the benevolent sentiments are favorable to health, and that the malevolent sentiments are opposed to it. Violent and sinful passions irritate, inflame, and carry trouble into the organization as well as the soul; the benevolent affections preserve the measured and harmonious play of all the functions. Hufeland again remarks that the greatest longevities pertain to wise and well-regulated lives. Thus, for health, strength, and life, virtue is better than vice: it is already much, it seems to me. I surely mean to speak of conscience only after health; but, in fine, with the body, our most constant host is conscience. Peace or trouble of conscience decides internal happiness or unhappiness. At this point of view, compare again order and disorder, virtue and vice. And without us, in society, to whom come esteem and contempt, consideration and infamy? Certainly opinion has its mistakes, but they are not long. In general, if charlatans, intriguers, impostors of every kind, for some time surreptitiously get suffrages, it must be that a sustained honesty is the surest and the almost infallible means of reaching a good renown.