Goodness is naught unless it tends towards old age and 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.
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