A. Yes; for that inclination leads naturally to action, and it is for this reason that envy is considered a sin?

Q. How does it forbid murder?

A. By the most powerful motives of self-preservation; for, first, the man who attacks exposes himself to the risk of being killed, by the right of defence; secondly, if he kills, he gives to the relations and friends of the deceased, and to society at large, an equal right of killing him; so that his life is no longer in safety.

Q. How can we, by the law of nature, repair the evil we have done?

A. By rendering a proportionate good to those whom we have injured.

Q. Does it allow us to repair it by prayers, vows, offerings to God, fasting and mortifications?

A. No:  for all those things are foreign to the action we wish to repair:  they neither restore the ox to him from whom it has been stolen, honor to him whom we have deprived of it, nor life to him from whom it has been taken away; consequently they miss the end of justice; they are only perverse contracts by which a man sells to another goods which do not belong to him; they are a real depravation of morality, inasmuch as they embolden to commit crimes through the hope of expiating them; wherefore, they have been the real cause of all the evils by which the people among whom those expiatory practices were used, have been continually tormented.

Q. Does the law of nature order sincerity?

A. Yes; for lying, perfidy, and perjury create distrust, quarrels, hatred, revenge, and a crowd of evils among men, which tend to their common destruction; while sincerity and fidelity establish confidence, concord, and peace, besides the infinite good resulting from such a state of things to society.

Q. Does it prescribe mildness and modesty?

A. Yes; for harshness and obduracy, by alienating from us the hearts of other men, give them an inclination to hurt us; ostentation and vanity, by wounding their self-love and jealousy, occasion us to miss the end of a real utility.

Q. Does it prescribe humility as a virtue?

A. No; for it is a propensity in the human heart to despise secretly everything that presents to it the idea of weakness; and self-debasement encourages pride and oppression in others; the balance must be kept in equipoise.

Q. You have reckoned simplicity of manners among the social virtues; what do you understand by that word?

A. I mean the restricting our wants and desires to what is truly useful to the existence of the citizen and his family; that is to say, the man of simple manners has but few wants, and lives content with a little.

Q. How is this virtue prescribed to us?