on, that
doing good to others produces love to them. And for myself I do not
believe the affections of a young man _can_ diminish towards one whose
happiness he is constantly studying to promote by every means in his
power, admitting there is no obvious change in her character. So that
no young person of principle ought ever to anticipate any such result.

Nor has a man any right to _sport_ with the affections of a young
woman, in any way whatever. Vanity is generally the tempter in this
case; a desire to be regarded as being admired by the women; a very
despicable species of vanity, but frequently greatly mischievous,
notwithstanding. You do not, indeed, actually, in so many words,
promise to marry; but the general tenor of your language and deportment
has that meaning; you know that your meaning is so understood; and if
you have not such meaning; if you be fixed by some previous engagement
with, or greater liking for another; if you know you are here sowing
the seeds of disappointment; and if you persevere, in spite of the
admonitions of conscience, you are guilty of deliberate deception,
injustice and cruelty. You make to God an ungrateful return for those
endowments which have enabled you to achieve this inglorious and
unmanly triumph; and if, as is frequently the case, you _glory_ in such
triumph, you may have person, riches, talents to excite envy; but every
just and humane man will abhor your heart.

The most direct injury against the spiritual nature of a fellow being
is, by leading him into vice. I have heard one young man, who was
entrusted six days in the week to form the immortal minds and hearts of
a score or two of his fellow beings, deliberately boast of the number
of the other sex he had misled. What can be more base? And must not a
terrible retribution await such Heaven daring miscreants? Whether they
accomplish their purposes by solicitation, by imposing on the judgment,
or by powerful compulsion, the wrong is the same, or at least of the
same nature; and nothing but timely and hearty repentance can save a
wretch of this description from punishment, either here or hereafter.

'Some tempers,' says Burgh, (for nothing can be more in point than his
own words) 'are so impotently ductile, that they can refuse nothing to
repeated solicitation. Whoever takes the advantage of such persons is
guilty of the lowest baseness. Yet nothing is more common than for the
debauched part of our sex to show their heroism