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Page 22
FOOTNOTES:
[37] 1 John iii.
[38] 1 Cor. xii. 25, 26.
[39] Cor. iii. 16.
LETTER V.
SELFISHNESS AND UNSELFISHNESS.
This is a difficult subject to address you upon, and one which you will
probably reject as unsuited to yourself. There are few qualities that
the possessor is less likely to be conscious of than either selfishness
or unselfishness; because the actions proceeding from either are so
completely instinctive, so unregulated by any appeal to principle, that
they never, in the common course of things, attract any particular
notice. We go on, therefore, strengthening ourselves in the habits of
either, until a double nature, as it were, is formed, overlaying the
first, and equally powerful with it. How unlovely is this in the case of
selfishness, even where there are, besides, fine and striking features
in the general character, and how lovely in the case of unselfishness,
even when, as too frequently happens, there is little comparative
strength or nobleness in its intellectual and moral accompaniments!
You are now young, you are affectionate, good-natured, obliging,
possessed of gay and happy spirits, and a sweetness of temper that is
seldom seen united with so much sparkling wit and lively sensibilities.
Altogether, then, you are considered a very attractive person, and, in
the love which all those qualities have won for you from those around
you, may bring forward strong evidence against my charge of selfishness.
But is not this love more especially felt by those who are not brought
into daily and hourly collision with you. They only see you bright with
good-humour, ready to talk, to laugh, and to make merry with them in any
way they please. They therefore, in all probability, do not think you
selfish. Are you certain, however, that the estimate formed of you by
your nearest relatives will not be the estimate formed of you by even
acquaintance some years hence, when lessened good-humour and
strengthened habits of selfishness have brought out into more striking
relief the natural faults of your character?
The selfishness of the gay, amusing, good-humoured girl is often
unobserved, almost always tolerated; but when youth, beauty, and
vivacity are gone, the vice appears in its native deformity, and she who
indulges it becomes as unlovely as unloved. It is for the future you
have cause to fear,--a future for which you are preparing gloom and
dislike by the habits you are now forming in the small details of daily
life, as well as in the pleasurable excitements of social intercourse.
As I said before, these, at present almost imperceptible, habits are
unheeded by those who are only your acquaintance: but they are not the
less sowing the seeds of future unhappiness for you. You will,
assuredly, at some period or other, reap in dislike what you are now
sowing in selfishness. If, however, the warning voice of an "unknown
friend" is attended to, there is yet time to complete a comparatively
easy victory over this, your besetting sin; while, on the contrary,
every week and every month's delay, by riveting more strongly the chains
of habit, increases at once your difficulties and your consequent
discouragement.
This day, this very hour, the conflict ought to begin: but, alas! how
may this be, when you are not yet even aware of the existence of that
danger which I warn you. It is most truly "a part of sin to be
unconscious of itself."[40] It will also be doubly difficult to effect
the necessary preliminary of convincing you of selfishness, when I am so
situated as not to be able to point out to you with certainty any
particular act indicative of the vice in question. This obliges me to
enter into more varied details, to touch a thousand different strings,
in the hope that, among so many, I may by chance touch upon the right
one.
Now, it is a certain fact, that in such inquiries as the present, our
enemies may be of much more use to us than our friends. They may, they
generally do, exaggerate our faults, but the exaggeration gives them a
relief and depth of colouring which may enable the accusation to force
its way through the dimness and heavy-sightedness of our self-deception.
Examine yourself, then, with respect to those accusations which others
bring against you in moments of anger and excitement; place yourself in
the situation of the injured party, and ask yourself whether you would
not attach tho blame of selfishness to similar conduct in another
person. For instance, you may perhaps be seated in a comfortable chair
by a comfortable fire, reading an interesting book, and a brother or
sister comes in to request that you will help them in packing something,
or writing something that must be finished at a certain time, and that
cannot be done without your assistance: the interruption alone, at a
critical part of the story, or in the middle of an abstruse and
interesting argument, is enough to irritate your temper and to
disqualify you for listening with an unprejudiced ear to the request
that is made to you. You answer, probably, in a tone of irritation; you
say that it is impossible, that the business ought to have been attended
to earlier, and that they could then have concluded it without your
assistance; or perhaps you rise and go with them, and execute the thing
to be done in a most ungracious manner, with a pouting lip and a surly
tone, insinuating, too, for days afterwards, how much you had been
annoyed and inconvenienced. The case would have been different if a
stranger had made the request of you, or a friend, or any one but a near
and probably very dear relative. In the former case, there would have
been, first, the excitement which always in some degree distinguishes
social from mere family intercourse; there would have been the wish to
keep up their good opinion of your character, which they may have been
deluded into considering the very reverse of unselfish. Lastly, their
thanks would of course be more warm than those which you are likely to
receive from a relative, (who instinctively feels it to be your duty to
help in the family labours,) and thus your vanity would have been
sufficiently gratified to reconcile you to the trouble and interruption
to which you had been exposed.
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