to esteem its worth. And it does not make a fellow appear any better
even to himself to condemn a cause that condemns his faults.

Saloon-keepers are engaged in an enterprise which in itself is lawful;
the same can be said of those who buy and sell poisons and dynamite and
fire-arms. The nature of his merchandise differentiates his business
from all other kinds of business, and his responsibilities are of the
heaviest. It may, and often does, happen that this business is
criminal; and in this matter the civil law may be silent, but the moral
law is not. For many a one such a place is an occasion of sin, often a
near occasion. It is not comforting to kneel in prayer to God with the
thought in one's mind that one is helping many to damnation, and that
the curses of drunkards' wives and mothers and children are being piled
upon one's head. How far the average liquor seller is guilty, God only
knows; but a man with a deep concern for his soul's salvation, it seems
would not like to take the risk.



CHAPTER XV.
ENVY.

WHEN envy catches a victim she places an evil eye in his mind, gives
him a cud to chew, and then sends him gadding.

If the mind's eye feeds upon one's own excellence for one's own
satisfaction, that is pride; if it feeds upon the neighbor's good for
one's own displeasure and unhappiness, that is envy. It is not alone
this displeasure that makes envy, but the reason of this displeasure,
that is, what the evil eye discerns in the neighbor's excellence,