lived to be nearly
seventy-three years old and died rich, he must have been in very fair harmony
with his surroundings. I have heard it said sometimes that such and such a
person's life was a lie: but no man's life can be a very bad lie; as long as it
continues at all it is at worst nine-tenths of it true.
    Mr. Pontifex's life not only continued a long time, but was prosperous right
up to the end. Is not this enough? Being in this world is it not our most
obvious business to make the most of it - to observe what things do bonâ fide
tend to long life and comfort, and to act accordingly? All animals, except man,
know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it
as much as man, and other circumstances, will allow. He has spent his life best
who has enjoyed it most - God will take care that we do not enjoy it at all more
than is good for us. If Mr. Pontifex is to be blamed it is for not having eaten
and drunk less and thus suffered less from his liver, and lived perhaps a year
or two longer.
    Goodness is naught unless it tends towards old age and a sufficiency of
means. I speak broadly and exceptis excipiendis. So the psalmist says, »The
righteous shall not lack anything that is good.« Either this is mere poetical
license, or it follows that he who lacks anything that is good is not righteous;
there is a presumption also that he who has passed a long life without lacking
anything that is good has, himself also, been good enough for practical
purposes.
    Mr. Pontifex never lacked anything he much cared about. True he might have
been happier than he was if he had cared about things which he did not care for,
but the gist of this lies in the if he had cared. We have all sinned and come
short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have
done, but in this particular case Mr. Pontifex did not care, and would not have
gained much by getting what he did not want.
    There is no casting of swine's meat before men worse than that which would
flatter virtue as though her true origin were not good enough for her, but she
must have a lineage, deduced as it were by spiritual heralds, from some stock
with which she has nothing to do. Virtue's true lineage is older and more
respectable than any that can be invented for her.