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Show VICARIOUS MORALITY. It was 'Artemus Ward,' we believe who remarked, when men were being called upon to make sacrifices for their country during the late civil war, that he was ready to sacrifice all of his first wife's relations. Such vicarious patriotism as this was very common at that time, and the joke was thoroughly relished. We are reminded of the humorist's remark by a certain thing that we see about us every day - a thing which we have been accustomed to call vicarious morality. There are a great many people who have very strict ideas of morality -- for others. They belong to the straitest straightest sect of the Pharisees -- by proxy. They repent in sackcloth and ashes of their neighbor's sins, and are full of sorrow for everybody's evil ways but their own. Nobody is so quick to see or so prompt to denounce any infraction of the moral law as this class of people, whenever the infraction is not one of their own. But as regards themselves and their own misdeeds they are quite otherwise. In the same instant they denounce the fault of another and commit the same or a worse themselves. For example, a journalist not long ago, went nearly into hysterics because a fellow journalist had "slandered" some one, as he thought. He insisted on an immediate and abject apology; and in the same paper, almost in the same column perpetrated an outrageous slander upon a full score of Christian men, which he has thus far failed to retract, though the slanderous character of his statements has been publicly pointed out to him. He was too busily engaged in plucking the mote out of another's eye to see the beam in his own. Tenderness of conscience is a good trait in general. But when it takes this special form of tenderness for some one else's sins and callousness for one's own, it is not quite so commendable. Morality is good, but vicarious morality is a doubtful blessing to the world. On the whole, we do not believe that the principle of division of labor is applicable to religion, however true it may be in economics. A man ought not to leave all the practicing to others while he does all the preaching himself. -- N.Y. Examiner and Chronicle. |