But the characteristic of moral grit is equality with the occasions which exact its exercise. It is morality with thews and sinews and blood and passions,--morality made man, and eager to put its phrases to the test of action. It gives and takes hard blows,--aims not only to be upright in deed, but downright in word,--silences with a "Thus saith the Lord" all palliations of convenient sins,--scowls ominously at every attempt to reconcile the old feud between the right and the expedient and make them socially shake hands,--and when cant taints the air, clears it with good wholesome rage and execration. On the virtues of this stubborn conscientiousness it is needless to dilate; its limitations spring from its tendency to disconnect morality from mercy, and law from love,--its too frequent substitution of moral antipathies for moral insight,--and its habit of describing individual men, not as they are in themselves, but as they appear to its offended conscience. Understanding sin better than it understands sinners, it sometimes sketches phantoms rather than paints portraits,--identifies the weakly wicked with the extreme of Satanic wickedness,--and in its assaults, pitches _at_ its adversaries rather than really pitches _into_ them. But, in a large moral view, the light of intellectual perception should shine far in advance of the heat of ethical invective, and an ounce of characterization is worth a ton of imprecations. Indeed, moral grit, relatively admirable as it is, partakes of the inherent defect of other and lower kinds of grit, inasmuch as its force is apt to be as unsympathetic as it is uncompromising, as ungracious as it is invincible. It drives rather than draws, cuffs rather than coaxes. Intolerant of human infirmity, it is likewise often intolerant of all forms of human excellence which do not square with its own conceptions of right; and its philanthropy in the abstract is apt to secrete a subtile misanthropy in the concrete. Brave, unselfish, self-sacrificing, and flinching from no consequences which its principles may bring upon itself, it flinches from no consequences which they may bring upon others; and its attitude towards the laws and customs of instituted imperfection is almost as sourly belligerent as towards those of instituted iniquity.