This is a difficult subject to address you upon, and one which you will probably reject as unsuited to yourself. There are few qualities that the possessor is less likely to be conscious of than either selfishness or unselfishness; because the actions proceeding from either are so completely instinctive, so unregulated by any appeal to principle, that they never, in the common course of things, attract any particular notice. We go on, therefore, strengthening ourselves in the habits of either, until a double nature, as it were, is formed, overlaying the first, and equally powerful with it. How unlovely is this in the case of selfishness, even where there are, besides, fine and striking features in the general character, and how lovely in the case of unselfishness, even when, as too frequently happens, there is little comparative strength or nobleness in its intellectual and moral accompaniments!

You are now young, you are affectionate, good-natured, obliging, possessed of gay and happy spirits, and a sweetness of temper that is seldom seen united with so much sparkling wit and lively sensibilities. Altogether, then, you are considered a very attractive person, and, in the love which all those qualities have won for you from those around you, may bring forward strong evidence against my charge of selfishness. But is not this love more especially felt by those who are not brought into daily and hourly collision with you. They only see you bright with good-humour, ready to talk, to laugh, and to make merry with them in any way they please. They therefore, in all probability, do not think you selfish. Are you certain, however, that the estimate formed of you by your nearest relatives will not be the estimate formed of you by even acquaintance some years hence, when lessened good-humour and strengthened habits of selfishness have brought out into more striking relief the natural faults of your character?

The selfishness of the gay, amusing, good-humoured girl is often unobserved, almost always tolerated; but when youth, beauty, and vivacity are gone, the vice appears in its native deformity, and she who indulges it becomes as unlovely as unloved. It is for the future you have cause to fear, a future for which you are preparing gloom and dislike by the habits you are now forming in the small details of daily life, as well as in the pleasurable excitements of social intercourse. As I said before, these, at present almost imperceptible, habits are unheeded by those who are only your acquaintance: but they are not the less sowing the seeds of future unhappiness for you. You will, assuredly, at some period or other, reap in dislike what you are now sowing in selfishness. If, however, the warning voice of an “unknown friend” is attended to, there is yet time to complete a comparatively easy victory over this, your besetting sin; while, on the contrary, every week and every month’s delay, by riveting more strongly the chains of habit, increases at once your difficulties and your consequent discouragement.

This day, this very hour, the conflict ought to begin: but, alas! how may this be, when you are not yet even aware of the existence of that danger which I warn you. It is most truly “a part of sin to be unconscious of itself." It will also be doubly difficult to effect the necessary preliminary of convincing you of selfishness, when I am so situated as not to be able to point out to you with certainty any particular act indicative of the vice in question. This obliges me to enter into more varied details, to touch a thousand different strings, in the hope that, among so many, I may by chance touch upon the right one.

Now, it is a certain fact, that in such inquiries as the present, our enemies may be of much more use to us than our friends. They may, they generally do, exaggerate our faults, but the exaggeration gives them a relief and depth of colouring which may enable the accusation to force its way through the dimness and heavy-sightedness of our self-deception. Examine yourself, then, with respect to those accusations which others bring against you in moments of anger and excitement; place yourself in the situation of the injured party, and ask yourself whether you would not attach tho blame of selfishness to similar conduct in another person. For instance, you may perhaps be seated in a comfortable chair by a comfortable fire, reading an interesting book, and a brother or sister comes in to request that you will help them in packing something, or writing something that must be finished at a certain time, and that cannot be done without your assistance: the interruption alone, at a critical part of the story, or in the middle of an abstruse and interesting argument, is enough to irritate your temper and to disqualify you for listening with an unprejudiced ear to the request that is made to you. You answer, probably, in a tone of irritation; you say that it is impossible, that the business ought to have been attended to earlier, and that they could then have concluded it without your assistance; or perhaps you rise and go with them, and execute the thing to be done in a most ungracious manner, with a pouting lip and a surly tone, insinuating, too, for days afterwards, how much you had been annoyed and inconvenienced. The case would have been different if a stranger had made the request of you, or a friend, or any one but a near and probably very dear relative. In the former case, there would have been, first, the excitement which always in some degree distinguishes social from mere family intercourse; there would have been the wish to keep up their good opinion of your character, which they may have been deluded into considering the very reverse of unselfish. Lastly, their thanks would of course be more warm than those which you are likely to receive from a relative, (who instinctively feels it to be your duty to help in the family labours,) and thus your vanity would have been sufficiently gratified to reconcile you to the trouble and interruption to which you had been exposed.

Still further, it is, perhaps, only to your own family that you would have indulged in that introductory irritation of which I have spoken. We have all witnessed cases in which inexcusable excitement has been displayed towards relatives or servants who have announced unpleasant interruptions, in the shape of an unwelcome visitor; while the moment afterwards the real offender has been greeted with an unclouded brow and a warm welcome, she not having the misfortune of being so closely connected with you as the innocent victim of your previous ill-temper.

I enter into these details, not because they are necessarily connected with selfishness, for many unselfish, generous-minded people are the unfortunate victims of ill-temper, to which vice the preceding traits of character more peculiarly belong; but for the purpose of showing you that your conduct towards strangers can be no test of your unselfishness. It is only in the more trying details of daily life that the existence of the vice or the virtue can be evidenced. It is, nevertheless, upon qualities so imperceptible to yourself as to require this close scrutiny that most of the happiness and comfort of domestic life depends.

You know the story of the watch that had been long out of order, and the cause of its irregularity not to be discovered. At length, one watchmaker, more ingenious than the rest, suggested that a magnet might, by some chance, have touched the mainspring. This was ascertained by experiment to have been the case; the casual and temporary neighbourhood of a magnet had deranged the whole complicated machinery: and on equally imperceptible, often undiscoverable, trifles does the healthy movement of the mainspring of domestic happiness depend. Observe, then, carefully, every irregularity in its motion, and exercise your ingenuity to discover the cause in good time; the derangement may otherwise soon become incurable, both by the strengthening of your own habits, and the dispositions towards you which they will impress on the minds of others.

Do let me entreat you, then, to watch yourself during the course of even this one day, first, for the purpose of ascertaining whether my accusation of selfishness is or is not well founded, and afterwards, for the purpose of seeking to eradicate from your character every taint of so unlovely, and, for the credit of the sex, I may add, so unfeminine a failing.

Before we proceed further on this subject, I must attempt to lay down a definition of selfishness, lest you should suppose that I am so mistaken as to confound with the vice above named that self-love, which is at once an allowable instinct and a positive duty.

Selfishness, then, I consider as a perversion of the natural and divinely-impressed instinct of self-love. It is a desire for things which are not really good for us, followed by an endeavour to obtain those things to the injury of our neighbour. Where a sacrifice which benefits your neighbour can inflict no real injury on yourself, it would be selfishness not to make the sacrifice. On the contrary, where either one or the other must suffer an equal injury, (equal in all points of view in permanence, in powers of endurance, &c.,) self-love requires that you should here prefer yourself. You have no right to sacrifice your own health, your own happiness, or your own life, to preserve the health, or the life, or the happiness of another; for none of these things are your own: they are only entrusted to your stewardship, to be made the best use of for God’s glory. Your health is given you that you may have the free disposal of all your mental and bodily powers to employ them in his service; your happiness, that you may have energy to diffuse peace and cheerfulness around you; your life, that you may “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” We read of fine sacrifices of the kind I deprecate in novels and romances: we may admire them in heathen story; but with such sacrifices the real Christian has no concern. He must not give away that which is not his own. “Ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s."

In the case of a sacrifice of life one which, of course, can very rarely occur, the dangerous results of thus, as it were, taking events out of the hand of God cannot be always visible to our sight at present: we should, however, contemplate what they might possibly be. Let us, then, consider the injury that may result to the self-sacrificer, throughout the countless ages of eternity, from the loss of that working-time of hours, days, and years, wilfully flung from him for the uncertain benefit of another. Yes, uncertain, for the person may at that time have been in a state of greater meetness for heaven than he will ever again enjoy: there may be future fearful temptations, and consequent falling into sin, from which he would have been preserved if his death had taken place when the providence of God seemed to will it. Of course, none of us can, by the most wilful disobedience, dispose events in any way but exactly that which his hand and his counsel have determined before the foundation of the world; but when we go out of the narrow path of duty, we attempt, as far as in us lies, to reverse his unchangeable decrees, and we “have our reward;” we mar our own welfare, and that of others, when we make any effort to take the providing for it out of the hands of the Omnipotent.

It is, however, only for the establishment of a principle that it could be necessary to discuss the duties involved in such rare emergencies. I shall therefore proceed without further delay to the more common sacrifices of which I have spoken, and explain to you what I mean by such sacrifices.

I have alluded to those of health and happiness. We have all known the first wilfully thrown away by needless attendance on such sick friends as would have been equally well taken care of had servants or hired nurses shared in the otherwise overpowering labour. Often is this labour found to incapacitate the nurse-tending friend for fulfilling towards the convalescent those offices in which no menial could supply her place such as the cheering of the drooping spirit, the selection and patient perusal of amusing books, an animated, amusing companionship in their walks and drives, the humouring of their sick fancy a sickness that often increases as that of the body decreases. For all these trying duties, during the often long and always painfully tedious period of convalescence, the nightly watcher of the sick-bed has, it is most likely, unfitted herself. The affection and devotion which were useless and unheeded during days and nights of stupor and delirium have probably by this time worn out the weak body which they have been exciting to efforts beyond its strength, so that it is now incapable of more useful demonstrations of attachment. Far be it from me to depreciate that fond, devoted watching of love, which is sometimes even a compensation to the invalid for the sufferings of sickness, at periods, too, when hired attendance could not be tolerated. Here woman’s love and devotion are often brightly shown. The natural impulses of her heart lead her to trample under foot all consideration of personal danger, fatigue, or weakness, when the need of her loved ones demands her exertions.

This, however, is comparatively easy; it is only following the instincts of her loving nature never to leave the sick room, where all her anxiety, all her hopes and fears are centred, never to breathe the fresh air of heaven, never to mingle in the social circle, never to rest the weary limbs, or close the languid eye. The excitement of love and anxiety makes all this easy as long as the anxiety itself lasts: but when danger is removed, and the more trying duties of tending the convalescent begin, the genuine devotion of self-denial and unselfishness is put to the test.

Nothing is more difficult than to bear with patience the apparently unreasonable depression and ever-varying whims of the peevish convalescent, whose powers of self-control have been prostrated by long bodily exhaustion. Nothing is more trying than to find anxious exertions for their comfort and amusement, either entirely unnoticed and useless, or met with petulant contradiction and ungrateful irritation. Those who have themselves experienced the helplessness caused by disease well know how bitterly the trial is shared by the invalid herself. How deeply she often mourns over the unreasonableness and irritation she is without power to control, and what tears of anguish she sheds in secret over those acts of neglect and words of unkindness her own ill-humour and apparent ingratitude have unintentionally provoked.

Those who feel the sympathy of experience will surely wish, under all such circumstances, to exercise untiring patience and unremitting attention; but, however strong this wish may be, they cannot execute their purpose if their own health has been injured by previous unnecessary watchings, by exclusion from fresh air and exercise. Those whose nervous system has been thus unstrung will never be equal to the painful exertion which the recovering invalid now requires. How much better it would have been for her if walks and sleep had been taken at times when an attentive nurse would have done just as well to sit at the bedside, when absence would have been unnoticed, or only temporarily regretted! This prudent, and, we must remember, generally self-denying care of one’s self, would have averted the future bodily illness or nervous depression of the nurse of the convalescent, at a time too when the latter has become painfully alive to every look and word, as well as act, of diminished attention and watchfulness; you will surely feel deep self-reproach if, from any cause, you are unable to control your own temper, and to bear with cheerful patience the petulance of hers.

I have dwelt so long on this part of my subject, because I think it very probable that, with your warm affections, and before your selfishness has been hardened by habits of self-indulgence, you might some time or other fall into the error I have been describing. In the ardour of your anxiety for some beloved relative, you may be induced to persevere in such close attendance on the sick-bed as may seriously injure your own health, and unfit you for more useful, and certainly more self-denying exertion afterwards. How much easier is it to spend days and nights by the sick-bed of one from whom we are in hourly dread of a final separation, whose helpless and suffering state excites the strongest feelings of compassion and anxiety, than to sit by the sofa, or walk by the side, of the same invalid when she has regained just sufficient strength to experience discomfort in every thing; when she never finds her sofa arranged or placed to her satisfaction; is never pleased with the carriage, or the drive, or the walk you have chosen; is never interested in the book or the conversation with which you anxiously and laboriously try to amuse her. Here it is that woman’s power of endurance, that the real strength and nobleness of her character is put to the most difficult test. Well, too, has this test been borne: right womanly has been the conduct of many a loving wife, mother, and sister, under the trying circumstances above described. Woman alone, perhaps, can steadily maintain the clear vision of what the beloved one really is, and can patiently view the wearisome ébullitions of ill-temper and discontent as symptoms equally physical with a cough or a hectic flush.

This noble picture of self-control can be realized only by those who keep even the best instincts of a woman’s nature under the government of strict principle, remembering that the most beautiful of these instincts may not be followed without guidance or restraint. Those who yield to such instincts without reflection and self-denial will exhaust their energies before the time comes for the fulfilment of duties.

The third branch of my subject is the most difficult. It may, indeed, appear strange that we should not have the right to sacrifice our own happiness: that surely belongs to us to dispose of, if nothing else does. Besides, happiness is evidently not the state of being intended for us here below; and that much higher state of mind from which all “hap" is excluded viz. blessedness is seldom granted unless the other is altogether withdrawn.

You must, however, observe that this blessedness is only granted when the lower state that of happiness could not be preserved except by a positive breach of duty, or when it is withheld or destroyed by the immediate interposition of God Himself, as in the case of death, separation, incurable disease, &c. Under any of the above circumstances, we have the sure promise of God, “As thy days are, so shall thy strength be.” The lost and mourned happiness will not be allowed to deprive us of the powers of rejoicing in hope, and serving God in peace; also of diffusing around us the cheerfulness and contentment which is one of the most important of our Christian duties. These privileges, however, we must not expect to enjoy, if, by a mistaken unselfishness, (often deeply stained with pride,) we sacrifice to another the happiness that lay in our own path, and which may, in reality, be prejudicial to them, as it was not intended for them by Providence: while, on the contrary, it may have been by the same Providence intended for us as the necessary drop of sweetness in the otherwise overpowering bitterness of our earthly cup.

We take, as it were, the disposal of our fate out of the hands of God as much when we refuse the happiness He sends us as when we turn aside from the path of duty on account of some rough passage we see there before us. Good and evil both come from the hands of the Lord. We should be watchful to receive every thing exactly in the way He sees it fit for us.

Experience, as well as theory, confirms the truth of the above assertions. Consider even your own case with relation to any sacrifice of your own real happiness to the supposed happiness of another. I can imagine this possible even in a selfish disposition, not yet hardened. Your good-nature, warm feelings, and pride (in you a powerfully actuating principle) may have at times induced you to make, in moments of excitement, sacrifices of which you have not fully “counted the cost.” Let us, then, examine this point in relation to yourself, and to the petty sacrifices of daily life. If you have allowed others to encroach too much on your time, if you have given up to them your innocent pleasures, your improving pursuits, and favourite companions, has this indulgence of their selfishness really added to their happiness? Has it not rather been unobserved, except so far to increase the unreasonableness of their expectations from you, to make them angry when it at last becomes necessary to resist their advanced encroachments? On your own side, too, has it not rather tended to irritate you against people whom you formerly liked, because you are suffering from the daily and hourly pressure of the sacrifices you have imprudently made for them? Believe me, there can be no peace or happiness in domestic life without a bien entendu self-love, which will be found by intelligent experience to be a preservative from selfishness, instead of a manifestation of it.

From all that I have already said, you will, I hope, infer that I am not likely to recommend any extravagant social sacrifices, or to bring you in guilty of selfishness for actions not really deserving of the name. Indeed, I have said so much on the other side, that I may now have some difficulty in proving that, while defending self-love, I have not been defending you. We must therefore go back to my former definition of selfishness namely, a seeking for ourselves that which is not our real good, to the neglect of all consideration for that which is the real good of others. This is viewing the subject an grand, a very general definition, indeed, but not a vague one, for all the following illustrations from the minor details of life may clearly be referred under this head.

These are the sort of illustrations I always prefer they come home so much more readily to the heart and mind. Will not some of the following come home to you? The indulgence of your indolence by sending a tired person on a message when you are very well able to go yourself sending a servant away from her work which she has to finish within a certain time keeping your maid standing to bestow much more than needful decoration on your dress, hair, &c., at a time when she is weak or tired driving one way for your own mere amusement, when it is a real inconvenience to your companion not to go another expressing or acting on a disinclination to accompany your friend or sister when she cannot go alone refusing to give up a book that is always within your reach to another who may have only this opportunity of reading it walking too far or too fast, to the serious annoyance of a tired or delicate companion refusing, or only consenting with ill-humour, to write a letter, or to do a piece of work, or to entertain a visitor, or to pay a visit, when the person whose more immediate business it is, has, from want of time, and not from idleness or laziness, no power to do what she requests of you dwelling on all the details of a painful subject, for the mere purpose of giving vent to and thus relieving your own feelings, though it may be by the harrowing up of those of others who are less able to bear it. All these are indeed trifles but

Trifles make the sum of human things,

and are sure to occur every day, and to form the character into such habits as will fit or unfit it for great proofs of unselfishness, should such be ever called for. Besides, it is on trifles such as these that the smoothness of “the current of domestic joy” depends. It is a smoothness that is easily disturbed: do not let your hand be the one to do it.

In all the trifling instances of selfishness above enumerated, I have generally supposed that a request has been made to you, and that you have not the trouble of finding out the exact manner in which you can conquer selfishness for the advantage of your neighbour. I must now, however, remind you that one of the penalties incurred by past indulgence in selfishness is this, that those who love you will not continue to make those requests which you have been in the habit of refusing, or, if you ever complied with them, of reminding the obliged person, from time to time, how much serious inconvenience your compliance has subjected you to. This, I fear, may have been your habit; for selfish people exaggerate so much every “little” (by “the good man”) “nameless, unremembered act,” that they never consider them gratefully enough impressed on the heart of the receiver without frequent reminders from themselves. If such has been the case, you must not expect the frank, confiding request, the entire trust in your willingness to make any not unreasonable sacrifice, with which the unselfish are gratified and rewarded, and for which perhaps you often envy them, though you would not take the trouble to deserve the same confidence yourself. Even should you now begin the attempt, and begin it in all earnestness, it will take some time to establish your new character. En attendant, you must be on the watch for opportunities of obliging others, for they will not be freely offered to you; you must now exercise your own observation to find out what they would once have frankly told you, whether you are tiring people physically or distressing them morally, or putting them to practical inconvenience. I do not make the extravagant supposition that all those with whom you associate have attained to Christian perfection; the proud and the resentful, as well as the delicate-minded, will suffer much rather than repeat appeals to your unselfishness which have often before been disregarded. They may exercise the Christian duty of forgiveness in other ways, but this is the most difficult of all. Few can attain to it, and you must not hope it.

Finally; I wish to warn you against believing those who tell you that such minute analysis of motives, such scrutiny into the smallest details of daily conduct, has a tendency to produce an unhealthy self-consciousness. This might, indeed, be true, if the original state of your nature, before the examination began, were a healthy one. “If Adam had always remained in Paradise, there would have been no anatomy and no metaphysics:” as it is not so, we require both. Sin has entered the world, and death by sin; and therefore it is that both soul and body require a care and a minute watchfulness that cannot, in the present state of things, originate either disease or sin. They have both existed before.

No one ever became or can become selfish by a prayerful examination into the fact of being so or not. In matters of mere feeling, it is indeed dangerous to scrutinize too narrowly the degree and the nature of our emotions. We have no standard by which to try them. If a medical man cannot be trusted to ascertain correctly the state of his own pulse, how much more difficult is it for the amateur to sit in judgment on the strength and number of the pulsations of his own heart and mind.

The case is quite different when feelings manifest themselves in overt acts: then they become of a nature requiring and susceptible of minute analyzation. This is the self-scrutiny I recommend to you.

May you be led to seek earnestly for help from above to overcome the hydra of selfishness, and may you be encouraged, by that freely offered help, to exert your own energies to the utmost!

Let me urge on your especial attention the following verses from the Bible on the subjects which we have been considering. If you selected each one of these for a week’s practice, making it at once a question, a warning, and a direction, it would be a tangible, so to speak, use of the Holy Scriptures, that has been found profitable to many:

“We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good to edification. Even Christ pleased not himself."

“The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister."

“He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again."

“Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others."

“Let all your things be done with charity."

“By love serve one another."

“But as touching brotherly love, ye need not that I write unto you, for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another."

“My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."

“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."