of science or party politics; all these may be often heard; but we may talk on all these brilliantly and well, and yet our best nature may not once be called to exert itself.  So again, in mere routine business, it is the same:  the body may toil; the pen move swiftly; the thoughts act in the particular matter before them vigorously; and yet we our proper selves, beings understanding and choosing between good and evil, have never bestirred ourselves at all.  It has been but a skirmishing at the outposts; not a sword had been drawn in the main battle.  Take younger persons, and the same thing is the case even more palpably.  Here there is less of business in the common sense of the term; the mind is almost always unbraced and resting.  We pass through the good and evil of our daily life, and our proper self scarcely ever is aroused to notice either the one or the other.

But the worst of it is, that this carelessness is not altogether accidental:  it is a carelessness which we do not wish to break.  So long as it lasts, we manage to get the activity and interest of life, without a sense of its responsibility.  We like exceedingly to lay the reins, as it were, upon the neck of our inclinations, to go where they take us, and to ask no questions whether we are in the right road or no.  Inclination is never slumbering:  this gives us excitement enough to save us from weariness, without the effort of awakening our conscience too.  Therefore society, expressing in its rules the feelings of its individual members, prescribes exactly such a style of conversation as may keep in exercise all other parts of our nature except that one which should be sovereign of all, and whose exercise is employed on things eternal.

Not being, then, properly in earnest,—­that is, our conscience and our choice of moral good and evil being in a state of repose,—­our language is happily contrived so as that it shall contain nothing to startle our sleeping conscience, if her ears catch any of its sounds.  We still commend good and dispraise evil, both in the general and in the particular.  But as good and evil are mixed in every man, and in various proportions, he who commends, the little good of a bad man, saying nothing of his evil,—­or he who condemns the little evil of a good man, saying nothing of his good,—­leads us evidently to a false practical conclusion; he leads us to like the bad man and to dislike the good.  Again, the lesser good becomes an evil if it keeps out a greater good; and, in the same way, the lesser evil becomes a good.  If we have no thought of comparing good things together, if our sovereign nature be asleep, then we shall most estimate the good to which we are most inclined; and where we find this we shall praise it, not observing that it is taking up the place of a greater good which the case requires, and, therefore, that it is in fact an evil.  So that our moral judgments may lead practically to great evil:  we may join with bad men and despise good; we may approve of qualities which, are, in fact, ruining a man; and despise others which, in the particular case, are virtues; without ever in plain words condemning virtue or approving vice.