cease to prate about wrongs inflicted by others, and magnified by being beheld through the haze of distance, and seek to redress those which lie at our own doors, and to redress which we shall only have to prevail upon ourselves to be just and gentle!  Arbitrary power is always associated either with cruelty, or conscious weakness.  True greatness is above the petty arts of tyranny.  Sometimes much domestic suffering may arise from a cause which is easily confounded with a tyrannical disposition—­we refer to an exaggerated sense of justice.  This is the abuse of a right feeling, and requires to be kept in vigilant check.  Nothing is easier than to be one-sided in judging of the actions of others.  How agreeable the task of applying the line and plummet!  How quiet and complete the assumption of our own superior excellence which we make in doing it!  But if the task is in some respects easy, it is most difficult if we take into account the necessity of being just in our decisions.  In domestic life especially, in which so much depends on circumstances, and the highest questions often relate to mere matters of expediency, how easy it is to be “always finding fault,” if we neglect to take notice of explanatory and extenuating circumstances!  Anybody with a tongue and a most moderate complement of brains can call a thing stupid, foolish, ill-advised, and so forth; though it might require a larger amount of wisdom than the judges possessed to have done the thing better.  But what do we want with captious judges in the bosom of a family?  The scales of household polity are the scales of love, and he who holds them should be a sympathizing friend; ever ready to make allowance for failures, ingenious in contriving apologies, more lavish of counsels than rebukes, and less anxious to overwhelm a person with a sense of deficiency than to awaken in the bosom, a conscious power of doing better.  One thing is certain:  if any member of a family conceives it his duty to sit continually in the censor’s chair, and weigh in the scales of justice all that happens in the domestic commonwealth, domestic happiness is out of the question.  It is manly to extenuate and forgive, but a crabbed and censorious spirit is contemptible.

There is much more misery thrown into the cup of life by domestic unkindness than we might at first suppose.  In thinking of the evils endured by society from malevolent passions of individuals, we are apt to enumerate only the more dreadful instances of crime:  but what are the few murders which unhappily pollute the soil of this Christian land—­what, we ask, is the suffering they occasion, what their demoralizing tendency—­when compared with the daily effusions of ill-humour which sadden, may we not fear, many thousand homes?  We believe that an incalculably greater number are hurried to the grave by habitual unkindness than by sudden violence; the slow poison of churlishness and neglect, is of all poisons the most destructive.  If this is true, we want a new definition for the