a man, with his life in his hands, goes forth on a
missionary or a philanthropic enterprise, like Xavier, or Henry Martyn,
or Howard, or Livingstone, or Patteson, or when a man, like Frederick
Vyner, insists on transferring his own chance of escape from a murderous
gang of brigands to his married friend, humanity at large rightly
regards itself as his debtor, and ordinary men feel that their very
nature has been ennobled and exalted by his example. But it is not only
these acts of widely recognised heroism that exact a response from
mankind. In many a domestic circle, there are men and women, who
habitually sacrifice their own ease and comfort to the needs of an aged
or sick or helpless relative, and, surely, it is not with scorn for
their weakness that their neighbours, who know their privations, regard
them, but with sympathy and respect for their patience and self-denial.
The pecuniary risks and sacrifices which men are ready to make for one
another, in the shape of sureties and bonds and loans and gifts, are
familiar to us all, and, though these are often unscrupulously wrung
from a thoughtless or over-pliant good-nature, yet there are many
instances in which men knowingly, deliberately, and at considerable
danger or loss to themselves, postpone their own security or convenience
to the protection or relief of their friends. It is in cases of this
kind, perhaps, that the line between weakness and generosity is most
difficult to draw, and, where a man has others dependent on him for
assistance or support, the weakness which yields to the solicitations of
a reckless or unscrupulous friend may become positively culpable.

The last class of instances will be sufficient to shew that it is not
always easy to determine where the good of others is greater than our
own. Nor is it ever possible to determine this question with
mathematical exactness. Men may, therefore, be at least excused if,
before sacrificing their own interests or pleasures, they require that
the good of others for which they make the sacrifice shall be plainly
preponderant. And, even then, there is a wide margin between the acts
which we praise for their heroism, or generosity, or self-denial, and
those which we condemn for their baseness, or meanness, or selfishness.
It must never be forgotten, in the treatment of questions of morality,
that there is a large number of acts which we neither praise nor blame,
and this is emphatically the case where the compe