relation to an older person, with the exception that, with him or
her, we cannot even attempt to require obedience. In that case we
must,--when it is necessary that we should speak at all,--assert the
right without antagonism to what we believe to be their wrong, and
without the slightest personal resistance to it. If we follow this
course, in most cases our friend will come to the right point of
view,--sometimes the result seems almost miraculous,--or, as is
often the case, we, because we are wholesomely open-minded, will
recognize any mistake in our own point of view, and will gladly
modify it to agree with that of our friend.

The trouble is that very few of us feel like working to remedy a
wrong merely for the sake of the right, and therefore we must have
an impetus of personal feeling to carry us on toward the work of
reformation. If we could once be strongly started in obedience to
the law from love of the law itself, we should find in that
impersonal love a clear light and power for effective action both in
the larger and in the smaller questions of life.

There is a popular cry against introspection and an insistence that
it is necessarily morbid, which works in direct opposition to true
self-control. Introspection for its own sake is self-centred and
morbid, but we might as well assert that it is right to have dirty
hands so long as we wear gloves, and that it is morbid to want to be
sure that our hands are clean under our gloves, as to assert that
introspection for the sake of our true spiritual freedom is morbid.
If I cannot look at my selfish motives, how am I going to get free
from them? It is my selfish motives that prevent true self-control.
It is my selfish motives that prompt me to the false control of
repression, which is counterfeit and for the sake of appearances