There is another analogy in animated nature, illustrative of the case of those who, without injury to themselves, (the injury to our neighbour is, as I said before, a different part of the subject,) may attend the ball-room, the theatre, and the race-course.  Those animals lowest in the scale of creation, those who scarcely manifest one of the energies of vitality, are also those which are the least susceptible of suffering from external causes.  The medusae are supposed to feel no pain even in being devoured, and the human zoophyte is, in like manner, comparatively out of the reach of every suffering but death.  Have you not seen some beings endowed with humanity nearly as destitute of a nervous system as the medusae, nearly as insusceptible of any sensation from the accidents of life.  Some of these, too, may possess virtue and piety as well as the animal qualities of patience and sweetness of temper, which are the mere results of their physical organization.  No degree of effort or discipline, however, (indeed they bear within themselves no capabilities for either,) could enable such persons to become eminently useful, eminently respected, or eminently loved.  They have doubtless some work appointed them to do, and that a necessary work in God’s earthly kingdom; but theirs are inferior duties, very different from those which you, and such as you, are called on to fulfil.

Have I in any degree succeeded in reconciling you to the unvaryingly-accompanying penalties necessary to qualify the glad consciousness of possessing intellectual powers, a warm heart, and a strong mind?  Your high position will indeed afford you far less happiness than that which may belong to the lower ranks in the scale of humanity; but the noble mind will soon be disciplined into dispensing with happiness;—­it will find instead—­blessedness.

If yours be a more difficult path than that of others, it is also a more honourable one:  in proportion to the temptations endured will be the brightness of that “crown of life which the Lord hath promised to them that love him."[94]

But there is, perhaps, less necessity for trying to impress upon your mind a sense of your superiority than for urging upon you its accompanying responsibility, and the severe circumspection it calls upon you to exercise.  Thus, from what I have above written, it necessarily follows that you cannot evade the question I am now pressing upon you by observing the effect of dissipation upon others, by bringing forward the example of many excellent women who have passed through the ordeal of dissipation untainted, and, still themselves possessing loving hearts and simple minds, are fearlessly preparing their daughters for the same dangerous course.  Remember that those from whom you would shrink from a supposed equality on other points cannot be safely taken as examples for your own course of life.  Your own concern is to ascertain the effect produced upon your own mind by different kinds of society, and to examine whether you yourself have the same healthy taste for simple pleasures and unexciting pursuits as before you engaged, even as slightly as you have already done, in the dissipation of a London season.