and early attention to the attainment of these mental habits is a matter of both personal and relative duty.
Cherish self-respect as, next to a firm religious faith, the best safeguard to respectability and peace of mind. Entirely consistent with—indeed, in a degree, productive of the most careful consideration of the rights of others, the legitimate development of this quality will tend to preserve you from unwise confidences, from injudicious intimacies, and from gross indulgences and unworthy pursuits. This will sustain you in the manly acknowledgment of poverty, if that shall chance to be your lot, when pride and principle contend for the mastery in practical matters, and enable you to realize fully, that
"To bear, is to conquer our fate!"
This will strengthen you to the endurance of that which nothing but absolute insignificance can escape—calumny. It will preserve you alike from an undue eagerness in defending yourself from unjust aspersion, and from a servile fear of "the world's dread laugh," from meriting and from resenting scandal, and convince you that its most effectual contradiction consists in a virtuous life. By listening to the dictates of this powerful coadjutor of conscience, you will believe with the poet, that
"Honor and Fame from no condition rise,"
and thus, with straightforward and unvarying purpose, illustrate your adoption of the motto,
"Act well your part, there all the honor lies!"
While I would earnestly counsel you to avoid that constant self-consciousness which is nearly allied to vanity and egotism, if not identical with them, you will find the habitual practice of self-examination greatly conducive to improvement. A calm, impartial analysis of words and actions, tracing each to their several motives, must tend to assist us to know ourselves, which an ancient philosopher, you may remember, pronounced the highest human attainment. Arraign yourself, without the advantage of special pleading, to borrow a legal phrase, at the bar of conscience, regarding this arbiter as the voice of Divinity enshrined within us, whenever assailed by doubts respecting any course of conduct you have adopted, or propose to adopt, and where you are thus taught to draw the line of demarcation between right and wrong,
"Let that aye be your border."
In this connection permit me to recommend the regular study of the Bible, and a systematic attendance upon public worship on the Sabbath. Do not read this most wonderful of books as a task, nor yet permit the trammels of early associations, hereditary prejudice, or blind superstition, to interfere with your search for the truths contained in its pages. Try to read the Scriptures as you would any other book, with the aid of such collateral information as you may be able to obtain respecting the origin of the several, and wholly, distinct productions of which it is composed, the authors of each, the purposes for which they were composed, and, in short, possess yourself of every available means of giving reality, simplicity, and truthfulness to your investigations. Study the Life of Christ, as written by the personal friends who were most constantly and intimately associated with him. Ponder upon his familiar sayings, remembered, and recorded in their simple memoranda, by the unlettered men who most frequently listened to them, compare the acts of Christ with his doctrines as a teacher, and judge for yourselves whether history, ancient or modern, has any parallel for the Perfection of the Model thus exhibited to the human race. Decide whether he was not the only earthly being who "never did an injury, never resented one done to him, never uttered an untruth, never practised a deception, and never lost an opportunity of doing good." Having determined this point in your own minds, adopt this glorious pattern for imitation, and adhere to it, until you find a truer and better model. We have nothing to do in judging of this matter with the imperfect illustrations afforded by the lives of professed imitators of Christ of the perfectibility to which his teachings tend. Why look to indifferent copies, when the great original is ever before us! Why seek in the frailty and fallibility of human nature a justification of personal distrust and indifference?