his hands, goes forth on a missionary or a philanthropic enterprise, like Xavier, or Henry Martyn, or Howard, or Livingstone, or Patteson, or when a man, like Frederick Vyner, insists on transferring his own chance of escape from a murderous gang of brigands to his married friend, humanity at large rightly regards itself as his debtor, and ordinary men feel that their very nature has been ennobled and exalted by his example.  But it is not only these acts of widely recognised heroism that exact a response from mankind.  In many a domestic circle, there are men and women, who habitually sacrifice their own ease and comfort to the needs of an aged or sick or helpless relative, and, surely, it is not with scorn for their weakness that their neighbours, who know their privations, regard them, but with sympathy and respect for their patience and self-denial.  The pecuniary risks and sacrifices which men are ready to make for one another, in the shape of sureties and bonds and loans and gifts, are familiar to us all, and, though these are often unscrupulously wrung from a thoughtless or over-pliant good-nature, yet there are many instances in which men knowingly, deliberately, and at considerable danger or loss to themselves, postpone their own security or convenience to the protection or relief of their friends.  It is in cases of this kind, perhaps, that the line between weakness and generosity is most difficult to draw, and, where a man has others dependent on him for assistance or support, the weakness which yields to the solicitations of a reckless or unscrupulous friend may become positively culpable.

The last class of instances will be sufficient to shew that it is not always easy to determine where the good of others is greater than our own.  Nor is it ever possible to determine this question with mathematical exactness.  Men may, therefore, be at least excused if, before sacrificing their own interests or pleasures, they require that the good of others for which they make the sacrifice shall be plainly preponderant.  And, even then, there is a wide margin between the acts which we praise for their heroism, or generosity, or self-denial, and those which we condemn for their baseness, or meanness, or selfishness.  It must never be forgotten, in the treatment of questions of morality, that there is a large number of acts which we neither praise nor blame, and this is emphatically the case where the competition is between a man’s own interests and those of his neighbours.  We applaud generosity; we censure meanness:  but there is a large intermediate class of acts which can neither be designated as generous nor mean.  It will be observed that, in my enumeration of the classes of acts to which praise and blame, self-approbation and self-disapprobation attach, I have carefully drawn a distinction between the invariable connexion which obtains between certain acts and the ethical approval of ourselves or others, and the only general connexion which obtains between the omission