tes his
activity, mitigates his class prejudices, and forms his judgment: and
his standard of honour will keep him substantially right amid much
fluctuation of opinions.

The reader, from his own experience of individual characters, will
supply other illustrations of the lines of thought I am enforcing. Some
temptations that beset us must be steadily faced and subdued. Others are
best met by flight--by avoiding the thoughts or scenes that call them
into activity; while other elements of character which we might wish to
be away are often better treated in the way of marriage--that is by a
judicious regulation and harmless application--than in the way of
asceticism or attempted suppression. It is possible for men--if not in
educating themselves, at least in educating others--to pitch their
standard and their ideal too high. What they have to do is to recognise
their own qualities and the qualities of those whom they influence as
they are, and endeavour to use these usually very imperfect materials to
the best advantage for the formation of useful, honourable and happy
lives. According to the doctrine of this book, man comes into the world
with a free will. But his free will, though a real thing, acts in a
narrower circle and with more numerous limitations than he usually
imagines. He can, however, do much so to dispose, regulate and modify
the circumstances of his life as to diminish both his sufferings and his
temptations, and to secure for himself the external conditions of a
happy and upright life, and he can do something by judicious and
persevering self-culture to improve those conditions of character on
which, more than on any external circumstances, both happiness and
virtue depend.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, ch. xxii.

[62] _Hist._ ii. 35.

[63] Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.

[64] Davis.

[65] Cable.

[66] Jefferies, _Field and Hedgerow_, p. 242.

CHAPTER XIII

MONEY

I do not think that I can better introduce the few pages which I propose
to write on the relations of money to happiness and to character than by
a pregnant passage from one of the essays[67] of Sir Henry Taylor. 'So
manifold are the bearings of money upon the lives and characters of
mankind, that an insight which should search out the life of a man in
his pecuniary relations would penetrate into almost every cranny of his
nature. He who knows like St. Paul both how to spare and how to abou