7. As regards the vices opposite to Temperance, an important distinction is to be drawn between him who sins by outburst of passion and him whose very principles are corrupt. [Footnote 8] The former in doing evil acknowledges it to be evil, and is prone to repent of it afterwards: the latter has lost his belief in virtue, and his admiration for it: he drinks in iniquity like water, with no after-qualms; he glories in his shame. The former is reclaimable, the latter is reprobate: his intellect as well as his heart is vitiated and gone bad. If there were no miracles, he would be a lost man: but God can work miracles in the moral as in the physical order: in that there is hope for him. [Footnote 8: See the note in _Aquinas Ethicus_, Vol. I., pp. 170, 171.] 8. A nation need not be virtuous in the great bulk of her citizens, to be great in war and in dominion, in laws, in arts, and in literature: but the bulk of the people must possess at least the sense and appreciation of virtue in order to such national greatness. When that sense is lost, the nation is undone and become impotent, for art no less than for empire. Thus the Greece of Pericles and of Phidias fell, to be "living Greece no more." 9. As in other moral matters, no hard and fast line of division exists between sinning from passion and sinning on principle, but cases of the one shade into cases of the others, and by frequent indulgence of passion principle is brought gradually to decay. _Readings_.--Ar., _Eth._, III., x.; St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 141, art. 2; _ib._, q. 141, art. 3, in corp.; _ib._, q. 142, art. 1; _ib._, q. 143, art. 1, in corp., ad 2, 3; _ib._, q. 161, art. 1, ad 5; _ib._, q. 161, art. 2, in corp.; _ib._, q. 161, art. 6, in corp., ad 1; _ib._, q. 157, art. 1, in corp., ad 3; _ib_, q. 156, art. 3; Ar., _Eth._, VII., viii. SECTION VIII.--_Of Fortitude_. 1. As Temperance is a curb, restraining animal nature in the pursuit of the good to which it goes out most eagerly, namely, life and the means of its continuance, so Fortitude also is a curb, withholding that nature from irrational flight from the evil which it most dreads. Aristotle tells us what that evil is: "Most dreadful of all things is death, for it is the limit, and for the dead man there appears to be no further good nor evil left." (_Eth._, III, vi., b.) Death is truly the limit to human existence: for, though the soul be immortal, the being of flesh and blood, that we call man, is dissolved in death, and, apart from supernatural hope of the resurrection, extinct for ever. Death therefore is the direst of all evils in the animal economy; and as such, is supremely abhorred by the sensitive appetite, which is the animal part of man. Fortitude moderates this abhorrence and fear by the dictate of reason. Reason shows that there are better things than life, and things worse than death, for man in his spiritual capacity as an intellectual and immortal being.