Beware of Virtue

What seems a good thing today
Turns out tomorrow to have been a disaster
What seemed
In the moral and spiritual sphere too
Like great virtues
In times past
Are easily seen today
As hideous evils
Let's take for example The Inquisition
In its own day
Among Catholics
The Holy Inquisition
Was regarded as we today regard the practice of psychiatry
You
You see
You feel that in curing a person of cancer
Almost anything is justified
The most complex operation
The most weird surgery
People suspended for days and days on end
On the end of tubes
With X Ray penetration
Burning
People undergoing shock treatment
People locked in the colorless monotonous corridors
Of mental institutions
In all good faith
They knew
That witchcraft
And heresy
Were terrible things
Awful plagues
Imperiling people's souls forever and ever
So any means were justified
To cure people of heresy

We don't change
We don't change
We doing the same thing today
But under different names
We don't change
We doing the same thing today
But under different names

We can look back at those people
And see how evil that was
But we can't see it in ourselves
So therefore beware
Of virtue

We don't change
We doing the same thing today
But under different names
We don't change
We doing the same thing today
But under different names

We don't change
We doing the same thing today
But under different names
We don't change
We doing the same thing today
But under different names

So therefore beware
Of virtue
So therefore beware
Of virtue