At present,
however, I suppose you to be sitting in judgment on those who are
entirely destitute of the aids and the responsibilities of a keen sense
of the beautiful: by nature or by education they know or have learned
nothing of it. How different, then, from your own must be their estimate
of virtue and duty! Add this, therefore, to all the other allowances
you have to make for them, and I will answer for it that any action
viewed through this qualifying medium will entirely change its aspect,
and your blame will most frequently turn to pity, though of course you
can feel neither sympathy nor respect.
On the other hand, the practice of dwelling only on the aggravating
circumstances of a case, will magnify into crime a trifling and
otherwise easily forgotten error. This is a fact in the mind's history
of which few people seem to be aware, and only few may be capable of
understanding. Its truth, however, may be easily proved by watching the
effect of words in irritating one person against another, and
increasing, by repeated insinuations, the apparent malignity of some
really trifling action. No one, probably, has led so blessed a life as
not to have been sometimes pained by observing one person trying to
exasperate another, who is, perhaps, rather peacefully inclined, by
pointing out all the aggravating circumstances of some probably
imaginary offence, until the listener is wrought up to a state of angry
excitement, and induced to look on that as an exaggerated offence which
would probably otherwise have passed without notice.
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