perpetrated.  In lesser matters, too, we must not be inactive, but use our influence and persuasion to call our fellows to better things.  They may well at some later day reproach us if we shirk our duty to help them see and correct their faults; still more may we be reproached by others who have been harmed by faults that we might have done something toward curing.  Often a single gentle and tactful admonition has turned the whole current of a man’s life.  The truest friendship is not too easy- going; it stimulates and checks as well as comforts.  Emerson happily phrases this aspect of the matter:  “I hate, when I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession.  Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.”

This is, however, only half the truth.  What Stevenson calls the “passion of interference with others” is one of the wretchedest poisoners of human happiness.  People are, after all, hopelessly at variance in ideals, and we must be content to let others live in their own way and according to their own inner light, as we live by ours.  Probably neither is the light of perfect day.  Parents are particularly at fault in this respect; rare is the father or mother who is willing that son and daughter should leave the parental paths and follow their own ideals.  Incalculable is the amount of needless suffering caused by the conscientious attempt to make others over into our own image.  As Carlyle wrote, “The friendliest voice must speak from without; and a man’s ultimate monition comes only from within.”  We need not only a shrugging “tolerance,” but a willingness to admit that those who differ from us may after all be in the right of it.  It often happens that as we live our standards change, and we come to see that those whom we were anxious to reform were less in need of reformation than we; and very likely while we were blaming others, they in their hearts were blaming us.  The older we grow the less we feel ourselves qualified for the office of censor.

Certain practical counsels may perhaps be not too impertinent:  Be sure you can take advice yourself without offense or irritation before you proffer it to others; there may be beams in your own eyes as well as motes in your neighbors’.  Be sure you see through the other’s eyes, and get his point of view; only so can you feel reasonably confident that you are right in your advice or reproof.[Footnote:  Cf.  W. E. H. Lecky, The Map of Life, p. 68:  “Few men have enough imagination to realize types of excellence altogether differing from their own.  It is this, much more than vanity, that leads them to esteem the types of excellence to which they themselves approximate as the best, and tastes and habits that are altogether incongruous with their own as futile and contemptible.”] Be sure that you are saying what you are saying for the other’s good, and not to give vent to your own irritability or selfishness or sense of superiority; say what must