The case is quite different when feelings manifest themselves in overt acts:  then they become of a nature requiring and susceptible of minute analyzation.  This is the self-scrutiny I recommend to you.

May you be led to seek earnestly for help from above to overcome the hydra of selfishness, and may you be encouraged, by that freely offered help, to exert your own energies to the utmost!

Let me urge on your especial attention the following verses from the Bible on the subjects which we have been considering.  If you selected each one of these for a week’s practice, making it at once a question, a warning, and a direction, it would be a tangible, so to speak, use of the Holy Scriptures, that has been found profitable to many:—­

“We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.  Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good to edification.  Even Christ pleased not himself."[46]

“The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister."[47]

“He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again."[48]

“Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others."[49]

“Let all your things be done with charity."[50]

“By love serve one another."[51]

“But as touching brotherly love, ye need not that I write unto you, for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another."[52]

“My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."[53]

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."[54]

“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."[55]

FOOTNOTES: 

[40] Archdeacon Manning.

[41] See Bishop Butler’s Sermons.

[42] 1 Cor. vi. 20.

[43] Acts iv. 28.

[44] Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection.

[45] Hannah More.

[46] Rom. xv. 1, 2, 3.

[47] Matt. xx. 28.

[48] 2 Cor. v. 15.

[49] Phil. ii. 4.

[50] 1 Cor. xvi. 14.

[51] Gal. v. 13.

[52] Thess. iv. 9.

[53] 1 John iii. 18.

[54] Rom. xiii. 9, 10.

[55] Matt. vii. 12.

LETTER VI.

SELF-CONTROL.

You will probably think it strange that I should consider it necessary to address you, of all others, upon the subject of self-control,—­you who are by nature so placid and gentle, so dignified and refined, that you have never been known to display any of the outbreaks of temper which sometimes disgrace the conduct of your companions.