"This is but a short letter to my dear Elizabeth. When I do address my dear girl, I ought to consider how I can best testify my friendship: for friendship let there be between us; never can you have a friend more warmly attached to you or more interested in your welldoing and happiness than myself. But if we are to be friends, you must allow me the privilege of a friend, a privilege by far the most valuable of all its excellencies. So thought your dear Uncle Stephen,[42] when in the very extreme bitterness of his grief, which was as great as that of any one I ever witnessed, though he is now able to control his feelings before company, he said to me while enlarging on the various particulars of my dear sister's extraordinary character, 'O, she was a friend to my soul! She told me frankly all my faults,' an office in which, I am obliged to confess, he charged me with having been deficient. This has arisen, however, solely from my scarcely ever having seen him alone, when only I could converse with him confidentially. But if I am to exercise this best prerogative, this most sacred and indispensable duty of friendship, it will be necessary for my dear Elizabeth to prepare her mind and temper for receiving it properly, and for deriving from it all the benefits it is capable of imparting. Shall I be honest, and I must be so or be silent; were I otherwise, the very sheet which I am writing would rise up in judgment against me at the last day; if then, I am frank and honest, I must declare to you, that it is on this quarter that it will be necessary for my dear girl to guard herself with the utmost watchfulness, and, still more, to _prepare herself_ with conscientious care. This is what St. Paul terms "exercising herself to maintain a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man": what the Book of Proverbs styles, "keeping the heart _with all diligence_:" for unless we have accustomed ourselves to _self-suspicion_, if I may use such a phrase, we never benefit as we might from the friendly reproofs of a real friend. We may receive his remarks with civility, and even give him credit for his kind intentions, but we shall be almost sure to let it appear to any acute observer at least, that we rather tolerate his frankness out of principle, or put up with it in consideration of the friendly motives by which it has been prompted, than that we listen to it with a sincere desire of profiting from it, still less that we welcome it as one of the most valuable services in design, even when not in fact, that could be rendered to us. The grand preparation that is needed is, Humility: that sense of our own infirmities and our own weakness, which is felt by every true, at least by every flourishing Christian. We read in the Scripture that 'our hearts are deceitful above all things:' by which is meant, that we are all prone to flatter ourselves, to form too high an estimate of our own good qualities, and too low an idea of our bad ones.