THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS
it is not some secret root of bitterness in your heart. And can you pretend to justify, by the innocency of the intention, discourses which flow from so corrupted a principle? You maintain that it is neither from hatred nor jealousy against your brother. I wish to believe it; but in your sarcasms may there not be motives, perhaps, still more shameful and mean? Is it not your wish to render yourself agreeable by turning your brother into an object of contempt and ridicule? Do you not sacrifice his character to your fortune? Courts are always so filled with these adulatory and sordidly interested satires on each other! The great are to be pitied whenever they yield themselves up to unwarrantable aversions. Vices are soon found out, even in that virtue itself which displeases them.
But, after all, you do not feel yourselves guilty, you say, of all these vile motives; and that it is merely through indiscretion and levity of speech, if it sometimes happens that you defame your brethren. But is it by that you can suppose yourself more innocent? Levity and indiscretion; that vice so unworthy of the gravity of a Christian, so distant from the seriousness and solidity of faith, and so often condemned in the Gospel—can it justify another vice? What matters it to the brother whom you stab whether it be done through indiscretion or malice? Does an arrow, unwittingly drawn, make a less dangerous or slighter wound than
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