Have we not forgotten the meaning of the word “virtue”? Once it stood for the good that was in a man, irrespective of the evil that might lie there also, as tares among the wheat. We have abolished virtue, and for it substituted virtues. Not the hero—he was too full of faults—but the blameless valet; not the man who does any good, but the man who has not been found out in any evil, is our modern ideal. The most virtuous thing in nature, according to this new theory, should be the oyster. He is always at home, and always sober. He is not noisy. He gives no trouble to the police. I cannot think of a single one of the Ten Commandments that he ever breaks. He never enjoys himself, and he never, so long as he lives, gives a moment’s pleasure to any other living thing. I can imagine the oyster lecturing a lion on the subject of morality. “You never hear me,” the oyster might say, “howling round camps and villages, making night hideous, frightening quiet folk out of their lives. Why don’t you go to bed early, as I do? I never prowl round the oyster-bed, fighting other gentlemen oysters, making love to lady oysters already married. I never kill antelopes or missionaries. Why can’t you live as I do on salt water and germs, or whatever it is that I do live on? Why don’t you try to be more like me?” An oyster has no evil passions, therefore we say he is a virtuous fish. We never ask ourselves—“Has he any good passions?” A lion’s behaviour is often such as no just man could condone. Has he not his good points also? Will the fat, sleek, “virtuous” man be as Welcome at the gate of heaven as he supposes? “Well,” St. Peter may say to him, opening the door a little way and looking him up and down, “what is it now?” “It’s me,” the virtuous man will reply, with an oily, self-satisfied smile; “I should say, I—I’ve come.” “Yes, I see you have come; but what is your claim to admittance? What have you done with your three score years and ten?” “Done!” the virtuous man will answer, “I have done nothing, I assure you.” “Nothing!” “Nothing; that is my strong point; that is why I am here. I have never done any wrong.” “And what good have you done?” “What good!” “Aye, what good? Do not you even know the meaning of the word? What human creature is the better for your having eaten and drunk and slept these years? You have done no harm—no harm to yourself. Perhaps, if you had you might have done some good with it; the two are generally to be found together down below, I remember. What good have you done that you should enter here? This is no mummy chamber; this is the place of men and women who have lived, who have wrought good—and evil also, alas!—for the sinners who fight for the right, not the righteous who run with their souls from the fight.”