If you must look for gratitude, at any rate consider whether your exertions are likely to be fully understood at present by those whom you have served; and whether it is not a reversion, rather than an immediate return, that you should look for—a reversion, too, in many cases to be realized only on the death of the benefactor. Moreover, it is useless and unreasonable to expect that any motives of gratitude will uniformly modify for you the peculiar tempers and dispositions of those whom you have served. Your benefits did not represent a permanent state of mind: neither will their gratitude. The sense of obligation, even in most faithful hearts, is often dormant; but evil tempers answer quickly to the lightest summons.
In all your projects for the good of others, beware lest your benevolence should have too much of a spirit of interference. Consider what it is you want to produce. Not an outward, passive, conformity to your wishes, but something vital which shall generate the feelings and habits you long to see manifested. You can clip a tree into
any form you please, but if you wish it to bear fruit when it has been barren, you must attend to what is beneath the surface, you must feed the roots. You must furnish it with that nutriment, you must supply it with those opportunities of sunshine, which will enable it to use its own energies. See how the general course of the world is governed. How slowly are those great improvements matured which our impatient nature might expect to have been effected at a single stroke. What tyrannies have been under the sun, things which we can hardly read of without longing for some direct divine interference to have taken place. Indeed, if other testimony were wanting, the cruelties permitted on earth present an awful idea of the general freedom of action entrusted to mankind. And can you think that it is left for you to drill men suddenly into your notions, or to produce moral ends by mere mechanical means? You will avoid much of this foolish spirit if you are really unselfish in your purposes; if, in dealing with those whom you would benefit, you refer your operations to them as the centre, and not to yourself, and the successes
of your plans. There is a noble passage in the history of the first great Douglas, the “good Lord James,” who, just before the battle of Bannockburn, seeing Randolph, his rival in arms, with a small body of men, contending against a much superior English force, rushed to his aid. “The little body of Randolph,” says Sir Walter Scott, “was seen emerging like a rock in the waves, from which the English cavalry were retreating on every side with broken ranks, like a repelled tide. ‘Hold and halt!’ said the Douglas to his followers; ‘we are come too late to aid them; let us not lessen the victory they have won by affecting to claim a share in it.’” It is the self-denying nature of this chivalrous deed that I would apply to far other circumstances. The interfering spirit, which I deprecate, would come, not to consummate the victory, but to hinder it.
For similar reasons I would have you take care that you do not adopt mere rules, and seek to impress them rigidly upon others, as if they were general principles, which must at once be suitable to all mankind. Do not imagine that your individual threads of experience
form a woven garment of prudence, capable of fitting with exactness any member of the whole human family.
There are several ungenerous motives, of some subtlety, which hide in the dark corners of the heart, and stand in the way of benevolence. For instance, even in good minds, there is apt to lurk some tinge of fear, or of dislike, at the prospect of an undoubted amelioration of the lot of others coming too fast, as these good people would say. Indeed, some persons find it hard to reconcile themselves to the idea of others’ burdens being readily removed, even when they themselves are making exertions to remove them.
Another feeling to beware of, is that of envy, which, strange as it seems, may sometimes arise upon the view of that very prosperity, which the person, feeling envy, has helped to create. The truth is, it is comparatively easy to avoid being envious of the good fortune which was established before our time, or which is out of our own sphere: but to be quite pleased with the good fortune
of those whom we recollect in other circumstances, and who, perhaps, have been accustomed to ask advice or assistance from us—that is the trial.
Another ungenerous sentiment, similar to the foregoing, and likely at times to prove a hindrance to benevolent exertion, arises from the comparison of our own past lot with that of the persons whose condition is sought to be improved. Most of us have a little tendency to grudge them this amelioration. We should shudder at the brutality of one, who, having attained to power, is more cruel because he has suffered much himself, (“eo immitior quia toleraverat”); but are we not of a like spirit, if any dissatisfaction steals over our minds at seeing others exempt from those sufferings, which in our own career fell heavily upon us. It is difficult to dislodge this kind of selfishness from the heart. Indeed, there can hardly be a surer symptom of sound benevolence in a man, than his taking pleasure in those paths being smoothened which he will never have to traverse again: I do not say in making them smoother—it is much easier to reconcile himself to