y to embitter.
Disappointed hopes, unsuccessful competitions, and frustrated pursuits,
sour and irritate the temper. A little personal experience of the
selfishness of mankind, damps our generous warmth and kind affections;
reproving the prompt sensibility and unsuspecting simplicity of our
earlier years. Above all, ingratitude sickens the heart, and chills and
thickens the very life's-blood of benevolence: till at length our
youthful Nero, soft and susceptible, becomes a hard and cruel tyrant;
and our youthful Timon, the gay, the generous, the beneficent, is
changed into a cold, sour, silent misanthrope.

And as in the case of amiable tempers, so in that also of what are
called useful lives, it must be confessed that their intrinsic worth,
arguing still merely on principles of reason, is apt to be greatly
over-rated. They are often the result of a disposition naturally
bustling and active, which delights in motion, and finds its labour more
than repaid, either by the very pleasure which it takes in its
employments, or by the credit which it derives from them. More than
this; if it be granted that Religion tends in general to produce
usefulness, particularly in the lower orders, who compose a vast
majority of every society; and therefore that these irreligious men of
useful lives are rather exceptions to the general rule; it must at least
be confessed that they are so far useless, or even positively
mischievous, as they either neglect to encourage or actually discourage
that principle, which is the great operative spring of usefulness in the
bulk of mankind.

Thus it might well perhaps be questioned, estimating these men by their
own standard, whether the _particular_ good in this case, is not more
than counterbalanced by the _general_ evil; still more, if their conduct
being brought to a strict account, they should be charged, as they
justly ought, with the loss of the good which, if they had manifestly
and avowedly acted from a higher principle, might have been produced,
not only directly in themselves, but indirectly and remotely in others,
from the extended efficacy of a religious example. They may be compared,
not unaptly, to persons whom some peculiarity of constitution enables to
set at defiance those established rules of living, which must be
observed by the world at large. These healthy debauchees, however they
may plead in their defence that they do themselves no injury, would
probably, but for their excesse