under these, and answer
them before I write any more to you? I think not, but I must make an end
of this....

Good-bye, and God bless you.

I am ever yours,
FANNY.

HARLEY STREET, Tuesday, January 4th, 1842.
DEAREST HARRIET,

... You say you wonder that those who love and worship Christ should be
wanting in patience and the spirit of endurance. Do you not wonder, too,
that they should fail in self-denial, charity, mercy, all the virtues of
their Divine Model? But this is a terrible chapter, and sad subject of
speculation for all of us, and I can't bear to speak upon it.

In talking once with my sister of self-condemnation, and our
condemnation of others, I used an expression which she took up as
eminently ridiculous; but I think she did not quite understand me. I
said that there was a feeling of _modesty_ which prevented one's
uttering the extent of one's own self-accusations, at which she laughed
very much, and said she thought that modesty ought to interfere in
behalf of others as well as one's self; but there are some reasons why
it does not. Severely as one may judge and blame others, it is always,
of course, with the perception that one cannot know the _whole_ of the
case for or against them; nevertheless, even with this conviction, there
are certain words and deeds of others which one condemns unhesitatingly.
Such sentences as these I pronounce often and without scruple (harshly,
perhaps, and therein committing most mischievous, foul sin in chiding
sin), but one does not utter that which one feels more rarely (however
strongly, in particular instances), one's impression of the evil
tendency of a whole character, the weakness or wickedness, the disease
which pervades the whole moral constitution, and which seems to denote
certain inevitable results; on these one hesitates to pronounce
opinion, not so much, I think, because of the uncertainty one feels, as
in the case of a special motive, or temptation to any special act, and
the liability to mistake, both in the quality of motive and quality of
temptation; as because so much deeper a condemnation is involved in such
judgments. It is the difference between a physician's opinion on an
acute attack of illness or a radical and fatal constitutional tendency.
This sort of condemnation requires such intimate knowledge that one can
hardly pa