While they are
making interest with others to help them, they forget to help themselves.
That in proportion as they lose faith in God and His goodness, they lose
courage and lose cheerfulness; and have too often to find a false courage
and a false cheerfulness, by drowning their cares in drink, or in mean
cunning and plotting and planning, which usually ends in failure and in
shame?
Are those who do most work, either the plotting or intriguing people? I
do not mean base false people. Of them I do not speak here. But really
good and kind people, honest at heart, who yet are full of distractions
of another sort; who are of double mind--look two ways at once, and are
afraid to be quite open, quite straightforward--who like to COMPASS their
ends, as the old saying is, that is to go round about, towards what they
want, instead of going boldly up to it; who like to try two or more ways
of getting the same thing done; and, as the proverb has it, have many
irons in the fire; who love little schemes, and plots, and mysteries,
even when there is no need for them.
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