bearings. We must not always take that for moral courage, which induces some persons to speak directly to a point considered by others of more delicacy as unapproachable; because this is too often done simply from an absence of feeling, and thus too often obtains a degree of credit of which it is wholly unworthy, as being the result of candor and a love of truth.
Neither must we call that moral courage which leads vulgar-minded and prejudiced persons to speak in a summary way of liking or disliking certain people and things, without any sufficient reason; though this mode of speakine is apt to gain very much upon children, whose passions, affections, and sympathies, are more easily awakened than their reasoning powers. Fond as they are, then, of pronouncing that decisive sentence — "I like," or, "I dislike," they ought to be encouraged to suspend the one, but more especially the other, until they have some idea what are the grounds upon which they pass such decided judgment.
A want of moral courage lies at the root of almost all the falsehoods which are told in early youth. There is in later life sometimes a love of falsehood for its own sake, which belongs to a degree of depravity not properly taken into account in these pages. And there is also occasionally found a strange propensity to tell voluntary and aimless untruths, a case which so nearly borders upon insanity, as to be almost beyond the reach of moral principle. With such a natural phenomenon, there are happily few directors of youth who have anything to do.
The mother's great duty is to endeavor so to fortify the moral character, as that children shall not be afraid to tell the truth — that they shall learn to love truth for its own sake, and to hate a lie. And here it may not be out of place to observe, that, so far as is practicable, we ought, in the training of youth, to search out and make use of all those faculties and propensities of human nature, which are capable of being turned to good account. It has been said by a popular writer of the present day, that "he who can not hate, can not love;" and without altogether coinciding with this extreme view of the case, we must allow that those persons who are most cordial in their affections, are generally the warmest in their feelings of indignation and abhor-
