and painful because it may often give a new beauty to the complexion. On
various constitutions it takes hold in various ways, and its presence is
first detected by the sufferer under various trials, and betrayed to the
observer by various symptoms. What I have just been describing is the
action that is at the root of it; but with the individual it does not
always take that form. Often indeed it does; but oftener still perhaps
it is discovered not in the helpless yet reluctant yielding to vice, but
in the sadness and the despondency with which virtue is practised--in
the dull leaden hours of blank endurance or of difficult endeavour; or
in the little satisfaction that, when the struggle has ceased, the
reward of struggle brings with it.

An earlier, and perhaps more general symptom still, is one that is not
personal. It consists not in the way in which men regard themselves, but
in the way in which they regard others. In their own case, their
habitual desire of right, and their habitual aversion to wrong, may have
been enough to keep them from any open breach with conscience, or from
putting it to an open shame. But its precarious position is revealed to
them when they turn to others. Sin from which they recoil themselves
they see committed in the life around them, and they find that it
cannot excite the horror or disapproval, which from its supposed nature
it should. They find themselves powerless to pass any general judgment,
or to extend the law they live by to any beyond themselves. The whole
prospect that environs them has become morally colourless; and they
discern in their attitude towards the world without, what it must one
day come to be towards the world within. A state of mind like this is no
dream. It is a malady of the modern world--a malady of our own
generation, which can escape no eyes that will look for it. It is
betraying itself every moment around us, in conversation, in literature,
and in legislation.