s blindness may have come to honour them,
they are in fact laden with mischief to the general life.

It was the thought of this sensitiveness of the soul to external
influences, and of the ease with which any bad influence, or bad custom
or practice or fashion, perverts common lives, and of the untold mischief
which is consequently latent in it, that winged the words of a well-known
writer when she protested, some years ago, against what she designated as
debasing the moral currency.

That writer was thinking primarily of vulgar jesting on great subjects,
which should stir us to admiration and reverence, and so debasing men's
tastes. She had in her mind the class of persons who have the art of
spoiling things that are noble or beautiful by their vulgar handling of
them; and of the mischief which is done by such persons to public taste
and tone and character.

But we may widen the reference. Whosoever, in anything that concerns
the conduct of life, spreads low notions, or drags down men's opinion or
taste, thus helping to pervert ordinary minds from those higher aims and
motives and those reverent views of character and life which should be
cherished for our common use and service, is debasing the moral currency.

Here, then, we have a very practical question for our consideration and
answering. "Is there anything in my life"--so the question comes to us
in our self-examination--"which could be so described? any influence,
spreading from my conduct, of which men might truly say that it also is
helping to debase the moral currency? Is there to be seen in it anything
that tends towards the lowering of common standards? any misuse of things
sacred or holy? any foolish or vulgar estimate of the higher things of
life?" And if we are in any doubt how to put these questions in a
concrete and practical shape, we have only to remember how any one who
helps to lower any standard of taste or conduct is debasing the moral
currency of life; how, for instance, all those are debasing it who
substitute any wrong notion of honour for right notions of honour, or who
put roughness and coarseness in place of manliness, or who set the
fashion of cynical judgments on good and bad characters.

Or we might take an illustration from what is, unhappily, a very common
element in English life: the habit of gambling sport. Wherever this
habit spreads, in any class of society, from the highest to the lowest,
its effect is invariable; it un