(If you don’t recognize it, this is an old illustration of Tom Sawyer finding a man passed out drunk in a hidden room of the local Temperance Tavern. I got it from the Lambertville Digital Library.)
Temperance. Alright! You caught me. The above is NOT a picture expressing temperance, but the opposite. It the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word “temperance”- has been for 25 or so of my 33 years, since I first read Tom Sawyer. I could throw in a little digression here to talk a little about how humility -as the recognition and acceptance of truth- is woven throughout all of these virtues, indeed every virtue. It guards us from self-deceit, with humility we call our faults what they are and don’t pass them off as virtues. Nor do we exaggerate our successes but focus our concern on what we are called to do and able to do. In this humility is part, not only of temperance, but of all virtues. But if I put that here it would sound an awful lot like I described temperance in the last full sentence on the previous page and am looking for something useful to say here. (Humility tells me this is probably the case). Moving on to. . .
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