othing is more beautiful in nature than human virtue. According to Plato, virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul. St. Thomas Aquinas, aided by grace and revelation to see deeper still into the nature of things, states that "Virtue is the perfecting of man for an activity by which he achieves his beatitude" (I, II, 62, 1).

It is for the sake of virtue that the basic institutions of culture exist, both human and divine: family, the academy, political society, and the Church. For man, the ordinary means to virtue is education. In fact, education aims at virtue; it has no other purpose. Thus each institution is responsible for the education to virtue, or education simply, according to the goods over which it has charge: the family, the temporal goods of domestic life; the academy, intellectual goods; political society, the temporal goods of public life; and the Church, the spiritual goods pertaining to eternal life. Since the Church aims at man's last end and highest good, and since the temporal order is subordinate to the spiritual as the body is subordinate to the soul, the Church's authority and rights in the cultural sphere of education are preeminent. The Church, then, is concerned with human culture, and in particular with the cultivation of natural reason and the discipline of the appetites with a view to man's supernatural destiny.

The College of St. Justin Martyr, as servant to the Church universal, seeks to develop the intellectual virtues proper to its station as a liberal arts institution. Such an education is ordered toward the highest truths of reason and faith. However, it can only claim to make a good beginning toward the achievement of the supreme end, namely, wisdom, which is architectonic with respect to all other training, be it political, professional, administrative, familial or technical.

As handmaid to the moral education proper to family life, the College of St. Justin Martyr seeks also to cultivate the moral virtues without which the perfection of the intellectual virtues becomes difficult, if not impossible. In the final reckoning, of course, the acquisition and exercise of both the moral and intellectual virtues is dependent on the receptivity and will of the student, who must voluntarily and regularly apply himself in study and in moral acts in community life. Nonetheless, insofar as moral action follows understanding and the rule of reason, the College has a significant role to play not only in the cultivation of right reason, but also in the perfecting of the moral virtues. By providing a wholesome, edifying, and studious environment, the College will contribute to the growth of virtue in its students. It remains to be said that all the virtues, and especially the crowning ones of faith, hope, and charity, come through human cooperation with the divine, specifically with the grace of Him who is the Dispenser of Virtue, as He has been called by our fathers in the faith.