A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues

We are right in thinking that our peace has something to do with love, but we continue to witness in the world, a failure of love. This is because love can only be channeled through virtue. We may have a great reservoir of love, but if we lack magnificence, or the virtue of justice, or courage, or perseverance, or chastity, or sobriety, or meekness or clemency, that love will remain in the reservoir, and the world around us will continue to burn from lovelessness, or ineffective love. If we are impetuous, thoughtless, or inconstant and negligent, if we are, like many people, unable to learn from experience (memory), and if we are not indifferent enough to the pleasures of touch, our love will not stretch beyond our own noses in order to bring life and light to those in our lives. The solution to so many of the problems of our world as well as the personal and emotional problems of our individual lives is to learn to cultivate the virtues. But as the word 'cultivate' suggests, this work is hard labor. It is much easier to cultivate a field, for it takes much less time. Cultivating the virtues takes a good part of a lifetime.