Honesty or Decorousness

Honesty, as we use the term here, means goodness,decorousness, decency. Strictly speaking, honesty is a general term for any virtue, and for all virtues together.

Honesty is the same as beauty in the spiritual meaning of the latter word. For virtue gives the soul beauty;honesty means virtue; hence honesty and beauty of soul (that is,beauty of character, beauty of life) are the same.

What is honest has excellence in itself, and therefore deserves honor. What is pleasing or pleasantquiets desire and gives delight. What is useful is good asa means to obtain something else. Hence, there is a distinction between the honest and the pleasing, between the honest and the useful-even though it may happen that all three are found in one subject, as, for instance in the virtue of justice, which is honest, may be pleasing, and is certainly useful for righteous living. But the three things are not coextensive, and to find one is not necessarily to find all three.

Since temperance repels in man what is most unbecomingto him, that is, excess in animal lusts, it lends a spiritual beauty to a man, and we call that beauty honesty. Thus, honesty,the beauty-conferring expression of temperance, is a quasi-integral part of temperance itself.