These things are health, wealth, ease, comfort, influence, honour, freedom from opposition and from pain; and yet, if you were to place all these blessings on the one side, and on the other side to place poverty, and disease, and anguish, and trouble, and contempt,--yet, if on _this_ side also you were to place truth and justice, and a sense that, however densely the clouds may gather about our life, the light of God will be visible beyond them, all the noblest men who ever lived would choose, as without hesitation they always have chosen, the _latter_ destiny.

It is not that they like failure, but they prefer failure to falsity; it is not that they love persecution, but they prefer persecution to meanness; it is not that they relish opposition, but they welcome opposition rather than guilty acquiescence; it is not that they do not shrink from agony, but they would not escape agony by crime.

The selfishness of Dives in his purple is to them less enviable than the innocence of Lazarus in rags; they would be chained with John in prison rather than loll with Herod at the feast; they would fight with beasts with Paul in the arena rather than be steeped in the foul luxury of Nero on the throne.

It is not happiness, but it is something higher than happiness; it is stillness, it is assurance, it is satisfaction, it is peace; the world can neither understand it, nor give it, nor take it away,--it is something indescribable--it is the gift of God.
"The fallacy" of being surprised at wickedness in prosperity, and righteousness in misery, "can only lie," says Mr.Froude, in words which would have delighted Epictetus, and which would express the inmost spirit of his philosophy, "in the supposed _right_ to happiness....
Happiness is not what we are to look for.

Our place is to be true to the best we know, to seek that, and do that; and if by 'virtue is its own reward' be meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing more, then it is a true and a noble saying....