You must not expect immediate and obvious gratitude to crown your exertions. The benevolence that has not duty for its stem, but merely springs from some affectionateness of nature, must often languish, I fear, when it comes to count up its returns in the way of grateful affection from those whom it has toiled for. And yet the fault is often as much in the impatience and unreasonable expectation of the benefactors, as in any ingratitude on the part of the persons benefited. If you must look for gratitude, at any rate consider whether your exertions are likely to be fully understood at present by those whom you have served; and whether it is not a reversion, rather than an immediate return, that you should look for—a reversion, too, in many cases to be realized only on the death of the benefactor. Moreover, it is useless and unreasonable to expect that any motives of gratitude will uniformly modify for you the peculiar tempers and dispositions of those whom you have served. Your benefits did not represent a permanent state of mind: neither will their gratitude. The sense of obligation, even in most faithful hearts, is often dormant; but evil tempers answer quickly to the lightest summons. * * * * * In all your projects for the good of others, beware lest your benevolence should have too much of a spirit of interference. Consider what it is you want to produce. Not an outward, passive, conformity to your wishes, but something vital which shall generate the feelings and habits you long to see manifested. You can clip a tree into any form you please, but if you wish it to bear fruit when it has been barren, you must attend to what is beneath the surface, you must feed the roots. You must furnish it with that nutriment, you must supply it with those opportunities of sunshine, which will enable it to use its own energies. See how the general course of the world is governed. How slowly are those great improvements matured which our impatient nature might expect to have been effected at a single stroke. What tyrannies have been under the sun, things which we can hardly read of without longing for some direct divine interference to have taken place. Indeed, if other testimony were wanting, the cruelties permitted on earth present an awful idea of the general freedom of action entrusted to mankind. And can you think that it is left for you to drill men suddenly into your notions, or to produce moral ends by mere mechanical means? You will avoid much of this foolish spirit if you are really unselfish in your purposes; if, in dealing with those whom you would benefit, you refer your operations to them as the centre, and not to yourself, and the successes of your plans. There is a noble passage in the history of the first great Douglas, the “good Lord James,” who, just before the battle of Bannockburn, seeing Randolph, his rival in arms, with a small body of men, contending against a much