A lot of English words have been drained of their meaning in the past 150 years[1]. Now when people say "virtue" they almost exclusively mean "some morally positive quality" like patience, kindness, or diligence. But the word virtue comes from the Latin word "vir" meaning "man", and had meanings like "valor, merit, moral perfection". You can sort of already see just by the fact that it started at the word "man" that it was associated with actions that men (humans) can perform. And the words "valor" and "merit" come from Latin words respectively meaning to be strong, and to get what you earned. Putting these together, it's sort of clear that the original deeper meaning of the English word "virtue" had a lot more to do with earning via hard work. It's evident that things like patience and kindness need to be "worked for". You can also see this in the phrase "by virtue of", meaning "be-cause of" (or "caused by"), that virtue is associated with cause and therefore action.

[1]: on archive.org I found a book that I wanted so much that I converted it to a black and white PDF and printed a hard cover copy for myself on lulu.com; but first I had to find the right version, since the original book was written in Spanish; so I compared the various English translations ranging from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, and at some point in the middle 1800s, the words it chose when translating were wayyyy less accurate than alternative ones. It seems that they chose what we would call more "modern" words, or at least words with more modern definitions to our own sensibilities, to translate these words, and then it just kept snowballing. I still don't know the cause of this, but I'm pretty annoyed by it. Because dammit, affection is a way different noun than love or even charity, and you completely miss the meaning of a sentence from the original author's perspective when it's not translated accuratel.