the power,
manifested chiefly therein, which we name Moral. "Let not thy left
hand know what thy right hand doeth:" whisper not to thy own heart,
How worthy is this action; for then it is already becoming worthless.
The good man is he who _works_ continually in welldoing; to whom
welldoing is as his natural existence, awakening no astonishment,
requiring no commentary; but there, like a thing of course, and as if
it could not but be so. Self-contemplation, on the other hand, is
infallibly the symptom of disease, be it or be it not the sign of
cure. An unhealthy Virtue is one that consumes itself to leanness in
repenting and anxiety; or, still worse, that inflates itself into
dropsical boastfulness and vain-glory: either way, there is a
self-seeking; an unprofitable looking behind us to measure the way we
have made: whereas the sole concern is to walk continually forward,
and make more way. If in any sphere of man's life, then in the Moral
sphere, as the inmost and most vital of all, it is good that there be
wholeness; that there be unconsciousness, which is the evidence of
this. Let the free, reasonable Will, which dwells in us, as in our
Holy of Holies, be indeed free, and obeyed like a Divinity, as is its
right and its effort: the perfect obedience will be the silent one.
Such perhaps were the sense of that maxim, enunciating, as is usual,
but the half of a truth: To say that we have a clear conscience, is to
utter a solecism; had we never sinned, we should have had no
conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated
by songs of triumph.

This, true enough, is an ideal, impossible state of being; yet ever
the goal towards which our actual state of being strives; which it is
the more perfect the nearer it can approach. Nor, in our actual world,
where Labour must often prove _in_effectual, and thus in all senses
Light alternate with Darkness, and the nature of an ideal Morality be
much modified, is the case, thus far, materially different. It is a
fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is
acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate
acquaintance with. Above all, the public acknowledgment of such
acquaintance, indicating that it has reached quite an intimate
footing, bodes ill. Already, to the popular judgment, he who talks
much about Virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspect; it is
shrewdly guessed that where there is a great preaching, there will be
little a