r own has been
smothered by the fatal homage of the lips and of the feelings only,
while the actions of the life were disobedient. Often has such a writer
or speaker stood in stern and truthfully severe judgment on the weak
"brother in Christ" when he has acted or spoken with an inconsistency
which the mere instinct of the beautiful would in his censor have
prevented. Such censors, however, ought to remember that these weak
brethren, though their instincts be less lofty, their sensibility less
acute, live closer to their principles than they themselves do to their
feelings; for the moment the natural impulse, in cases where that is the
only guide, is enlisted on the side of passion, the perception of the
beautiful is entirely sacrificed to the gratification of the senses.
When the animal nature comes into collision with the spiritual, the
highest dictates of the latter will be unheeded, unless the supremacy of
the spiritual nature be habitually maintained in practice as well as in
theory. In short, that keen perception of the true and the beautiful,
which is an essential ingredient in the formation of a noble character,
becomes, in the case of the self-indulgent worldling, only an increase
of his responsibility, and a deepening dye to his guilt. At present,
however, I suppose you to be sitting in judgment on those who are
entirely destitute of the aids and the responsibilities of a keen sense
of the beautiful: by nature or by education they know or have learned
nothing of it. How different, then, from your own must be their estimate
of virtue and duty! Add this, therefore, to all the other allowances
you have to make for them, and I will answer for it that any action
viewed through this qualifying medium will entirely change its aspect,
and your blame will most frequently turn to pity, though of course you
can feel neither sympathy nor respect.

On the other hand, the practice of dwelling only on the aggravating
circumstances of a case, will magnify into crime a trifling and
otherwise easily forgotten error. This is a fact in the mind's history
of which few people seem to be aware, and only few may be capable of
understanding. Its truth, however, may be easily proved by watching the
effect of words in irritating one person against another, and
increasing, by repeated insinuations, the apparent malignity of some
really trifling action. No one, probably, has led so blessed a life as
not to have been sometimes pained by ob