you
have served; and whether it is not a reversion, rather than an immediate
return, that you should look for--a reversion, too, in many cases to be
realized only on the death of the benefactor. Moreover, it is useless
and unreasonable to expect that any motives of gratitude will uniformly
modify for you the peculiar tempers and dispositions of those whom you
have served. Your benefits did not represent a permanent state of mind:
neither will their gratitude. The sense of obligation, even in most
faithful hearts, is often dormant; but evil tempers answer quickly to the
lightest summons.

* * * * *

In all your projects for the good of others, beware lest your benevolence
should have too much of a spirit of interference. Consider what it is
you want to produce. Not an outward, passive, conformity to your wishes,
but something vital which shall generate the feelings and habits you long
to see manifested. You can clip a tree into any form you please, but if
you wish it to bear fruit when it has been barren, you must attend to
what is beneath the surface, you must feed the roots. You must furnish
it with that nutriment, you must supply it with those opportunities of
sunshine, which will enable it to use its own energies. See how the
general course of the world is governed. How slowly are those great
improvements matured which our impatient nature might expect to have been
effected at a single stroke. What tyrannies have been under the sun,
things which we can hardly read of without longing for some direct divine
interference to have taken place. Indeed, if other testimony were
wanting, the cruelties permitted on earth present an awful idea of the
general freedom of action entrusted to mankind. And can you think that
it is left for you to drill men suddenly into your notions, or to produce
moral ends by mere mechanical means? You will avoid much of this foolish
spirit if you are really unselfish in your purposes; if, in dealing with
those whom you would benefit, you refer your operations to them as the
centre, and not to yourself, and the successes of your plans. There is a
noble passage in the history of the first great Douglas, the "good Lord
James," who, just before the battle of Bannockburn, seeing Randolph, his
rival in arms, with a small body of men, contending against a much
superior English force, rushed to his aid. "The little body of
Randolph," says Sir Walter Scott,