This day, this very hour, the conflict ought to begin:  but, alas! how may this be, when you are not yet even aware of the existence of that danger which I warn you.  It is most truly “a part of sin to be unconscious of itself."[40] It will also be doubly difficult to effect the necessary preliminary of convincing you of selfishness, when I am so situated as not to be able to point out to you with certainty any particular act indicative of the vice in question.  This obliges me to enter into more varied details, to touch a thousand different strings, in the hope that, among so many, I may by chance touch upon the right one.

Now, it is a certain fact, that in such inquiries as the present, our enemies may be of much more use to us than our friends.  They may, they generally do, exaggerate our faults, but the exaggeration gives them a relief and depth of colouring which may enable the accusation to force its way through the dimness and heavy-sightedness of our self-deception.  Examine yourself, then, with respect to those accusations which others bring against you in moments of anger and excitement; place yourself in the situation of the injured party, and ask yourself whether you would not attach tho blame of selfishness to similar conduct in another person.  For instance, you may perhaps be seated in a comfortable chair by a comfortable fire, reading an interesting book, and a brother or sister comes in to request that you will help them in packing something, or writing something that must be finished at a certain time, and that cannot be done without your assistance:  the interruption alone, at a critical part of the story, or in the middle of an abstruse and interesting argument, is enough to irritate your temper and to disqualify you for listening with an unprejudiced ear to the request that is made to you.  You answer, probably, in a tone of irritation; you say that it is impossible, that the business ought to have been attended to earlier, and that they could then have concluded it without your assistance; or perhaps you rise and go with them, and execute the thing to be done in a most ungracious manner, with a pouting lip and a surly tone, insinuating, too, for days afterwards, how much you had been annoyed and inconvenienced.  The case would have been different if a stranger had made the request of you, or a friend, or any one but a near and probably very dear relative.  In the former case, there would have been, first, the excitement which always in some degree distinguishes social from mere family intercourse; there would have been the wish to keep up their good opinion of your character, which they may have been deluded into considering the very reverse of unselfish.  Lastly, their thanks would of course be more warm than those which you are likely to receive from a relative, (who instinctively feels it to be your duty to help in the family labours,) and thus your vanity would have been sufficiently gratified to reconcile you to the trouble and interruption to which you had been exposed.