fact not your own, the diminished, perhaps for ever injured, confidence which they and all who become acquainted with the circumstances will place in you, and, finally, the probability that you have deprived some honest, industrious, self-denying tradesman of his hardly-earned dues, to bestow the misnamed generosity upon some object of distress, who, however real the distress may be now, has probably deserved it by a deficiency in all those good qualities which maintain in respectability your defrauded creditor.  The very character, too, of your creditor may suffer by your inability to pay him, for he, miscalculating on your honesty and truthfulness, may, on his side, have engaged to make payments which become impossible for him, when you fail in your duty, in which case you can scarcely calculate how far the injury to him may extend; becoming a more permanent and serious evil than his incapacity to answer those daily calls upon him of which I have before spoken.  In short, if you will try to bring vividly before you all the painful feelings that passed through your mind, and all the contingencies that were contemplated by you on any one of these occasions, you will scarcely differ from me when I assert my belief that the name of dishonesty would be a far more correct word than that of generosity to apply to such actions as the above:  you are, in fact, giving away the money of another person, depriving him of his property, his time, or his goods, under false pretences, and, in addition to this, appropriating to yourself the pleasure of giving, which surely ought to belong by right to those to whom the gift belongs.

I have here considered one of the most trying cases, one in which the withholding of your liberality becomes a really difficult duty, so difficult that the opportunity should be avoided as much as possible; and it is for this very purpose that the science of economy should be diligently studied and practised, that so “you may have to give to him that needeth,” without taking away that which is due to others.  Probably in most of the cases to which I have referred your memory, some previous acts of self-denial would have saved you from being tempted to the sin of giving away the property of another.  I would not willingly suppose that an act of self-denial at the very time you witnessed the case of distress might have provided you with the means of satisfying both generosity and honesty, for, as I said before, I know you to have a keen sense of justice; and though you have never yet been vigilant enough in the practice of economy, I cannot believe that, with an alternative before you, you would indulge in any personal expenditure, even bearing the appearance of almost necessity, that would involve a failure in the payment of your debts.  I speak, then, only of acts of previous self-denial, and I wish you to be persuaded, that unless these are practised habitually and incessantly you can never be truly generous.  A readiness to give that which costs you nothing, that which is so truly a superfluity that it involves no sacrifice, is a mere animal instinct, as selfish perhaps, though more refinedly so than any other species of self-indulgence.  Generosity is a nobler quality, and one that can have no real existence without economy and self-denial.