There are people
in every community whose pride leads them into shameful transactions.
They would not condescend to mingle with their social inferiors, but
they will subsist on the earnings of their friends, and consider it no
disgrace to borrow money which they have no intention of returning.
Their vanity, at times, commits them to extravagances which they have
no means of supporting. They ought to have carriages and horses,
mansions and pictures, with all the luxuries of affluence--at least
so they think--and, being destitute of the resources requisite to
maintain such state, they become adepts in those arts which qualify
for the penitentiary. Others have such confidence in the strength of
their virtue, such commanding arrogance of integrity, that, like a
captain who underestimates the force of an enemy and overrates his
own, they neglect to place a picket-guard on the outskirts of their
moral camp, and in such an hour as they think not they are surprized
and lost. Even possessors of religion are not always clear of this
folly, or safe from its perils.
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