Temperance, again, is not the repression of lower impulses in the interest of those abstractly higher, as it came to be in the popular interpretations of Platonism, and as it was in Stoicism. With Aristotle it is the stern and remorseless exclusion of whatever cannot be brought into subjection to my chosen ends, whatever they may be. As Stevenson says in true Aristotelian spirit, "We are not damned for doing wrong: we are damned for not doing right." For temperance lies not in the external thing done or left undone; but in that relation of means to worthy ends which either the doing or the not doing of certain things may most effectively express. We shall never get any common basis of understanding on what we call the temperance question of to-day until we learn to recognise this internal and moral, as distinct from the external and physical, definition of what true temperance is. Temperance isn't abstinence. Temperance isn't indulgence. Neither is it moderation in the ordinary sense of that term. True temperance is the using of just so much of a thing,--no more, no less, but just so much,--as best promotes the ends one has at heart. To discover whether a man is temperate or not in anything, you must first know the ends at which he aims; and then the strictness with which he uses the means that best further those ends, and foregoes the things that would hinder them. Temperance of this kind looks at first sight like license. So it is if one's aims be not broad and high. In the matter of sexual morality, Aristotle's doctrine as applied in his day was notoriously loose. Whatever did not interfere with one's duties as citizen and soldier was held to be permissible. Yet as Green and Muirhead, and all the commentators on Aristotle have pointed out, it is a deeper grasp of this very principle of Aristotle, a widening of the conception of the true social end, which is destined to put chastity on its eternal rock foundation, and make of sexual immorality the transparently weak and wanton, cruel and unpardonable vice it is. To do this, to be sure, there must be grafted on to it the Christian principle of democracy,--a regard for the rights and interests of persons as persons. The beauty of the Aristotelian principle is that it furnishes so stout and sturdy a stock to graft this principle on to. When Christianity is unsupported by some such solid trunk of rationality, it easily drops into a sentimental asceticism. Take, for example, this very matter of sexual morality. Divorced from some such great social end as Aristotelianism requires, the only defence you have against the floods of sensuality is the vague, sentimental, ascetic notion that in some way or other these things are naughty, and good people ought not to do them. How utterly ineffective such a barrier is, everybody who has had much dealing with young men knows perfectly well. And yet that is pretty much all the opposition current and conventional morality is offering at the present time. The