"Almost," he said.
"Take my advice, and make a clean breast of it, my dear boy;" and I felt kindly towards him for the way he spoke about his sister. "Depend upon it, no half confidences do in such a case. Tell her that I shall come to you on Thursday of next week;" and I pressed his hand. I had never cared about him for his own sake, but my heart warmed towards him for hers.
PART VI.
THE "——."
Piccadilly, July 1.
I am now about to venture upon the very thinnest ice upon which fool ever rushed. The fact is, I am morally trembling like an aspen; but somebody must do it. I have put it off for five months, and tried to work up my courage by hammering away at the fashionable world, but they take it like lambs. Dear people, whatever their vices may be, they never resent criticism. Whether their consciences tell them they are superior to it, or whether they have not got consciences, I don't know, but, on the whole, the fashionable world is an easy, good-natured world; but oh, not so that other world, which is still essentially "the world," and very necessary to keep unspotted from, though it is thankful that it is not as that other world is, from which in its humility it takes care to distinguish itself by the self-applied epithet of "religious." It grieves me to think of the number of my friends whom I shall pain by presuming to touch upon this subject, to say nothing of the righteous indignation I shall call down from those whose function it has been to give, not take, reproof. The great art of the "worldly-holies"—not, I believe, deliberately practised, but insensibly acquired—is to confuse in the minds of the poor dear "wholly-worldlies" the sublime religion which they profess, with their mode of professing it. So they would have it to be understood that, when you find fault with their practices, you are reflecting upon that very religion, the precepts of which they seem to some utterly to ignore. The "religious world" is no more composed of exclusively good men and women than the Episcopalian Church is. I will even venture to go further, and say that the good men and women in it are a very small minority, judging only from the public performances of the "worldly-holies" in matters in which humility, sincerity, self-sacrifice, and toleration, are concerned. And if you want a proof of it, ask your friends in the religious world if they agree in what I say of it, and the very few you may find who do, will be that small minority of whom I speak.
I am perfectly ready to admit that I have no more right to preach to them than they have to preach to me. I only ask those among them who are sincere, to believe that I am actuated by the same desire to improve them that they are to do good to me. It is not merely in their own interest, but in the interest of their fellow-men, that I venture to write thus, and to point out to them that, if they "lived the life," instead of talking the talk, they might attract instead of repelling that other world which they condemn. It is not living the life to form a select and exclusive society, with its vanities and its excitements, and its scandals and its envyings and jealousies, which keeps itself aloof from the worldly world, on the ground that it professes and represents a religion of love. Those who sit in Moses' seat are not on that account examples of the "life;" on the contrary, "whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works, for they say and do not."