make an heroic character in a romance.  In real life, however, they, every one of them, require strict self-control to form either a Christian character, or one that will confer peace and happiness.  You may be all that I have described, and I believe you to be so, while, at the same time your severe judgments and unreasonable expectations may be productive of unceasing discomfort to yourself and all around you.  Your friends plainly see that you expect too much from them, that you are annoyed when their duller perceptions can discover no grounds for your annoyance, that you decline their offers of service when they are not made in exactly the refined manner your imagination requires.  Your annoyance may seldom or never express itself in words, but it is nevertheless perceptible in the restraint of your manner, in your carelessness of sympathy on any point with those who generally differ from you, in the very tone of your voice, in the whole character of your conversation.  Gradually the gulf becomes wider and wider that separates you from those among whom it has pleased God that your lot should be cast.

You cannot yet be at all sensible of the dangers I am now pointing out to you.  You cannot yet understand the consequences of your present want of self-control in this particular point.  The light of the future alone can waken them out of present darkness into distinct and fatal prominence.

Habit has not yet formed into an isolating chain that refinement of mind and loftiness of character which your want of self-control may convert into misfortunes instead of blessings.  Whenever, even now, a sense of total want of sympathy forces itself upon you, you console yourself with such thoughts as these:  “Sheep herd together, eagles fly alone,"[57]&c.

Small consolation this, even for the pain your loneliness inflicts on yourself, still less for the breach of duties it involves.

There must, besides, be much danger in a habit of mind that leads you to attribute to your own superiority those very unpleasantnesses which would have no existence if that superiority were more complete.  For, in truth, if your spiritual nature asserted its due authority over the animal, you would habitually exercise the power which is freely offered you, of supreme control over the hidden movements of your heart as well as over the outward expression of the lips.

I would strongly urge you to consider every evidence of your isolation—­of your want of sympathy with others—­as marks of moral inferiority; then, from your conscientiousness of mind, you would seek anxiously to discover the causes of such isolation, and you would endeavour to remove them.