A meddler in the affairs of others is seldom moved by the spirit of charity. He is not curious to discover where he can lend a hand of assistance. If such were the case, it were a trait to be admired rather than despised; but, allied as it is to envy and slander, to idle curiosity and inquisitiveness, it can but be detested by all honest seekers for others' good, and shunned by the truly enlightened and refined. And if one would be honored and respected, he will strive to be as free from the spirit of meddling as possible. He will relegate that to the low and frivolous, and respect himself too highly to be classed among them.
Anger
Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man. It affects nothing it sets about, and hurts the man who is possessed by it more than the other against whom it is directed.
The disadvantages arising from anger, which are its unfailing concomicants under all circumstances, should prove a panacea for the complaint. In moments of cool reflection the man who indulges it views with a deep disgust the desolation wrought by passion. Friendship, domestic happiness, self-respect, the esteem of others, are swept away as by a whirlwind, and one brief fit of anger sometimes suffices to lay in wreck the home happiness which years have been cementing together. What crimes have not been committed in the paroxysms of anger! Has not the friend murdered his friend? the son massacred his parent? the creature blasphemed his Creator. When, indeed, the nature of this passion is considered what crimes may it not commit? Is it not the storm of the human mind which wrecks every better affection—wrecks reason and conscience, and, as a ship driven without helm or compass before the rushing gale, is not the mind borne away without guide or government by the tempest of unbounded rage?
To be angry about trifles is low and childish; to rage and be furious is brutish; and to maintain perpetual wrath is akin to the practice and temper of devils. The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting future debts in his passionate moments which he may have to pay in the future, and when it is most inconvenient to make payment. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, in injury and reparation; for anger begins in folly, but ends in repentance. Anger may be looked for in the character of weak-minded people, children not yet learned to govern themselves, and those who, for any reason, are not expected to have full command over their faculties; but no sensible man or woman in the full possession of their powers will suffer the degradation of allowing themselves to be overcome by anger without afterwards experiencing the utmost mortification.
A passionate temper renders a man unfit for advice, deprives him of his reason, robs him of all that is really great or noble in his nature; it makes him unfit for conversation, destroys friendship, changes justice into cruelty, and turns all order into confusion. Man was born to reason, to reflection, and to do all things quietly and in order. Anger takes from him this prerogative, transforms his manship into childish petulance, his reasoning powers into brute instinct. Consider, then, how much more you often suffer from your anger than from those things for which you are angry. Consider, further, whether that for which you give way to angry outbreaks is any fit compensation whatever for the degradation and loss you suffer by giving way to passion.