There is no more doubt of this than of any other first principle of Christian conduct; and I am very sorry that these morbid notions have taken such hold of you.

If you yield to them, you will make yourself soon disliked and feared, and give a great deal of needless pain to your neighbors." It was hard for Mr.Allen to be severe with Mercy, for he loved her as if she were his younger sister; but he honestly thought her to be in great danger of falling into a chronic morbidness on this subject, and he believed that stern words were most likely to convince her of her mistake.
It was a sort of battle, however,--this battle which Mercy was forced to fight,--in which no human being can help another, unless he has first been through the same battle himself.

All that Mr.Allen said seemed to Mercy specious and, to a certain extent, trivial: it failed to influence her, simply because it did not so much as recognize the point where her difficulty lay.
"If Mr.Allen tries till he dies, he will never convinc me that it is not deceiving people to make them think you're glad to see them when you're not," Mercy said to herself often, as, with flushed cheeks and tears in her eyes, she walked home after these conversations.

"He may make me think that it is right to deceive them rather than to make them unhappy.

It almost seems as if it must be; yet, if we once admitted that, where should we ever stop?
It seems to me that would be a very dangerous doctrine.