and looks upon any interference with his sales as an infringement
of his rights. Our selfish interest in any business, or in any
scheme of profit, distorts all truth either directly or indirectly
related to such business or scheme, or living in its region and
atmosphere. The President of the United States, or the governor of
the commonwealth, may be an excellent man; but if I want an
office, and he fails to appoint me to it, why I don't exactly
regard him as such. He becomes to me a very ordinary and vulgar
sort of man indeed; but if he give me my office, then, though he
may be all that his enemies think him, he seems to me to be
invested with a singular nobility of character that other people
do not apprehend at all.

The vices of humanity are sad media through which to receive
truth--often so opaque that no truth can reach the mind at all. It
is impossible for a man whose affections are bestialized, whose
practices are libertine, and whose imaginations are all impure, to
receive the truth that there are such things as purity and virtue,
and that there are men and women around him who are virtuous and
pure. There is no truth which personal vice will not distort. The
approaches to a sensual mind are through the senses, and the same
may be said of all minds in a general way; but the approaches to a
sensual mind are only through the senses, and they, being
perverted, abused, exhausted, or unduly excited, furnish the
utterly unreliable avenues by which truth reaches the soul. The
grand reason why truth, published from the pulpit and the
platform, revealed in periodicals and books, and embodied in
pictures and statues, works no greater changes upon the minds and
morals of men, is, that it never gets inside of men in the shape
in which it is uttered. It passes through such media of bigotry,