Thirteen Virtues in Today’s World

My copy of Poor Richard’s Almanack (Benjamin Franklin) arrived in the mail today. The chap­ter “On Virtue, Vice, God, and Faith” caught my atten­tion fairly quickly, unsur­pris­ingly. In it, Franklin said this:

He is ill clothed that is bare of virtue.

Perhaps my first thought shouldn’t have been “good for me,” and on the next page, a larger pas­sage jumped out:

The Thirteen Virtues:

1. Temperance: Eat not to dull­ness. Drink not to elevation.

2. Silence: Speak not but what may ben­e­fit oth­ers or your­self. Avoid tri­fling conversation.

3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your busi­ness have its time.

4. Resolution: Resolve to per­form what you ought. Perform with­out fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to oth­ers or your­self; i.e., waste nothing.

6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in some­thing use­ful. Cut off all unnec­es­sary actions.

7. Sincerity: Use no hurt­ful deceit. Think inno­cently and justly; if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice: Wrong none by doing injuries or omit­ting the ben­e­fits that are your duty.

9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forbear resent­ing injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no unclean­li­ness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. Tranquility: Be not dis­turbed at tri­fles or at acci­dents com­mon or unavoidable.

12. Chastity: Rarely use ven­ery but for health or off­spring — never to dull­ness, weak­ness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

This is not the first time I’ve been intro­duced to Franklin’s thir­teen virtues, and they have been men­tioned here in the past, and I paired each up to sev­eral Bible verses which are rel­e­vant to the virtue.

It’s been a few years, and it’s dif­fi­cult to look at that list and find any area within which I feel I’ve grown. From a worldly stand­point, are the virtues even rel­e­vant these days?

We as a cul­ture uplift as role mod­els those who live extrav­a­gant life styles, who are loose in their sex­u­al­ity or at least the talk of it, who have no clue what Jesus was actu­ally like (let alone Socrates), who gos­sip, back­bite, and oth­er­wise rel­ish in idle con­ver­sa­tion (hello, social net­work­ing), and much more.

I real­ize that there is noth­ing new under the sun. Franklin likely observed many who lived lives anti­thet­i­cal to the listed virtues. As time goes on, that divide between the vir­tu­ous and the wicked has become more stark. The enter­tain­ment indus­try is doing its absolute best to encour­age the idol­a­try of any and every­thing which hin­ders vir­tu­os­ity, sin­ners of all stripes are becom­ing increas­ingly fla­grant (some go so far as to have “pride parades”), and malls and dis­count stores are tire­lessly work­ing to get you to waste your money on trifles.

And there are those in the world who would have us to believe that imi­tat­ing Jesus is as absurd as imi­tat­ing Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

Franklin, like the Christ, taught that fin­gers should not be pointed if the pointed fin­ger is itself unclean, and so the dis­cus­sion of vir­tu­os­ity is ulti­mately a very per­sonal one. It is “How can I grow in virtue?” and not “How can I get them to grow?”

But by embrac­ing virtue and grow­ing in it, per­haps the hap­pi­ness which is virtue’s daugh­ter (as Franklin put it) would be seen by oth­ers, nay pur­sued by others.

We serve a God who is con­cerned with even the small­est spar­row, who has num­bered even the hairs your head. Even the small­est obe­di­ence is bet­ter than sac­ri­fice, and He will notice it.