Following Augustine, Thomas contends that patience regards sorrow caused by some hardship or evil.34 The patient person endures this hardship and bears this evil with, as Augustine puts it, “an equal mind,” one that is not disturbed by excessive sorrow “lest he abandon ... the goods whereby he may advance to better things.”35 With help from Aristotle, Aquinas spells out this logic a bit more. The patient person endures “arduous and difficult things for the sake of virtue or profit55 lest the mind be “broken by sorrow, and fall away from its greatness, by reason of the stress of threatening evil.”36This captures quite nicely what the tolerant must do as they cope with some of the differences and disagreements that confound the various societies they inhabit. These differences and disagreements are evils of this precisely sort. They threaten the union of love and conviction that every society assumes in some measure, and they tend to generate sorrow over the estrangements they cause.