Personality

of others. It takes years of experiences and fine discrimination before 34 the things which we say will not come back to us void, and we only get ourselves disliked and delay our own law of larger usefulness by meddling. Another sin is to play the traitor in small hidden ways to friendship, business or love; little suggestive insinuations behind the backs of others, a trifling betrayal of weak spots in their character or work or business, which they, unconsciously, put in our hands, or which we arrived at through the intimacy of friendship, and a friendship which made it appear possible for them to live for a moment, perhaps, off their guard. Every human life is transmuting something either in the self or environment. The guise of friendship allows a closer intimacy than is accorded to others, and through this we enter into shrines and temples of lives which are kept closed and sealed to the big useless crowd outside. It is a sin of the deepest dye not to have a shrine of absolute truth in our own life, and then to sneak like a thief in the night into the holy sacredness of another's shrine and turn from this to the outside world, tear down this shrine and demolish this temple with insidious hints and half-veiled suggestions, until we have let loose a floodtide of suspicion around it. This is theft on the subjective side of life, and as nature avenges herself on the material thief, just so the Higher Avenger of truth takes strict account. Even Hell itself has no respect for its own valiants! On the path of life these human amarantine weeds flourish for a time, "suffering no flower, except their own, to rise," and often it seems as if the flower of their ultimate failure was slow to ripen, but the mills of the gods grinding slowly are daily bringing them nearer and nearer their own law. Men may never be able to fix the truth upon them, they are never found out, but the "hound of Heaven" tracks them down. We meet them everywhere. They hear the baying of the hound in their woods, and weighted down by disease, loss and poverty, often despair; they ask the reason of their failure, and then it is that New Thought gives them a pen or word picture of themselves. Amid all the great psychological sins, there are thousands of minor ones; lack of attention lack of earnestness; lack of reverence for truly holy things; taking one's self too seriously; failing to give a legitimate interest to other people's problems; untidiness; vulgarity; unnecessary mannerisms