Then he was before, and he falls forever to a lower level in his own esteem. all dishonesties lose half their repugnance to him, and all the defenses of his integrity are half broken down. A second temptation to fraud will find less to overcome in him, and a third still less; and at last the fallen man will be wholly contented with his place among the predatory creatures of the world, and will slink through life, hunting for prey. Surely he is the greater victim of the wrong! Such effects on ourselves of what we do are consequent upon our moral freedom, which causes every act of right or wrong doing to be an exercise of some trait of character, good or bad, and so invigorates it, as the muscles of of our free dom to do right. the body are invigorated by the work they do. Thus we become the makers of our own characters, and our freedom to act rightly or wrongly is seen, in that The privilege view, to be the highest of all the privileges we enjoy. It is common to call right-doing a Duty, and so it is if we give a proper meaning to the word. But our idea of Duty is apt to be the idea of an unwelcome obligation; something to be done which we find more merit in doing because it is disagreeable and hard; and this is an idea which fits no true conception of the doing of Right. The more carefully we consider what that is, in its nature, and what results from it, to ourselves and to the world of mankind at large, the more clearly we can see that when we prefer Right to Wrong we are exercising the most precious of all the Privileges of man. IV SELF-CONTROL, AND THE FORMATION OF HABIT OUR freedom to choose between Right and Wrong is part of a general power of self-control, or self-government, with which we are nobly endowed. We are animated in our being, we may say, by various forces, not always in agreement, and there is something in us — the something which makes up the "I" and "Me" of each one of us. that has a power of government over them all, to constrain them to work together, to one common end. We may call them forces, because we have no better name; we are only conscious of their action in us, and know nothing as to what they are. One of them forms ideas in our minds, and compares and combines them, in acts of judgment and reasoning; another sways us with emotions, of love, hatred, anger, and the like; another colors our self-consciousness with feelings of pleasure and pain; a fourth excites us to desires and appetites, stirred in our bodies or in our minds; still another appears in what we call Will, which manifests itself in every act, but which nobody can even describe in a satisfactory way; and, lastly, we find the moral impulse which urges us toward Right Conduct, when we have seen intelligently what is Right. It may be that these are only differing forms of one intellectual force, just as |