fortune to displease you: that you find amiable only those who have nothing to contest with you; that all who rise above, or are even equal to you, constrain and hurt you; and that, to have a claim to your friendship, it is necessary to have none either to your pretensions or expectancies.
But I go still farther, and I entreat you to listen to me. I admit your brother to have more faults than even you accuse him of having. Alas! you are so gentle and so friendly toward those from whom you expect your fortune and your establishment, and whose temper, haughtiness, and manners shock you. You bear with all their pride, their repulses, their scorns; you swallow all their inequalities and caprices; you are never disheartened; your patience is always greater than your antipathy and your repugnance, and you neglect nothing to please. Ah! if you regarded your brother, as he upon whom depends your eternal salvation, as he to whom you are to be indebted, not for a fortune of dross, and an uncertain establishment, but for the fortune even of your eternity, would you follow, with regard to him, the caprice of your fancy? Would you not conquer the unjust antipathy which estranges you from him? Would you suffer so much in putting your inclinations in unison with your eternal interests, and in doing upon yourself so useful and so necessary a violence? You bear with every thing for the world and for vanity; and you cry out, how hard! from the moment that a single painful proceeding is exacted of you for eternity.
And say not that there are caprices of nature, of which no account can be given, and that we are not the masters of our fancies and likings. I grant this to a certain point; but there is a love of reason and of religion, which ought always to gain ascendancy over that of nature. The gospel exacts not that you have a fancy for your brother, it exacts that you love him; that is to say, that you bear with him, that you excuse him, that you conceal his faults, that you serve him; in a word, that you do for him whatever you would wish to have done for yourself. Charity is not a blind and capricious fancy, a natural liking, a sympathy of temper and disposition; it is a just, enlightened, and reasonable duty; a love which takes its rise in the impulses of grace, and in the views of faith. It is not rightly loving our brethren, to love them only through fancy; it is loving one^s self. Charity alone enables us to love them as we ought, and it alone can form real and steadfast friends. For fancy is continually changing, and charity never dieth; fancy seeks only itself, and charity seeketh not its own interest, but the interest of whom it loves; fancy is not a proof against every thing, a loss, a proceeding, a disgrace, — and charity riseth superior to death: fancy loves only its own conveniency; and charity findeth nothing amiss, and suffereth every thing for whom it loveth: fancy is blind, and often renders even the vices of our brethren amiable to us; and charity never giveth praise to iniquity, and in others loveth only the truth. The friends of grace are therefore much more to be relied on than those of na-
