These are all remarks which envy may easily find an opportunity of insinuating against any of its rivals; but, as I said before, I imagine that you have too much self-respect to manifest openly such feelings, to reveal such meanness to the eyes of man.  Alas! you have not an equal fear of the all-seeing eye of God.  What I apprehend most for you is the allowing yourself to cherish secretly all these palliative circumstances, that you may thus reconcile yourself to a superiority that mortifies you.  If you habitually allow yourself in this practice, it will be almost impossible to avoid feeling pleasure instead of pain when these same circumstances happen to be pointed out by others, and when you have thus all the benefit, and none of the guilt or shame, of the disclosure.  When envy is freely allowed to take these two first steps, a further progress is inevitable.  Self-respect itself will not long preserve you from outward demonstrations of that which is inwardly indulged, and you are sure to become in time the object of just contempt and ridicule.  It will soon be well known that the surest way to inflict pain upon you is to extol the excellences or to dwell on the happiness of others, and your failings will be considered an amusing subject for jesting observation to experimentalize upon.  I have often watched the downward progress I have just described; and, unless the grace of God, working with your own vigorous self-control, should alter your present frame of mind, I can see no reason why you should escape when others inevitably fall.

The circumstance in which this vice manifests itself most painfully and most dangerously is that of a large family.  How deplorable is it, when, instead of making each separate interest the interest of the whole, and rejoicing in the love and admiration bestowed on each separate individual, as if it were bestowed on the whole, such love and such admiration excite, on the contrary, irritation and regret.

Among children, this evil seldom attracts notice; if one girl is praised for dancing or singing much better than her sister, and the sister taunted into further efforts by insulting comparisons, the poor mistaken parent little thinks that, in the pain she inflicts on the depreciated child, she is implanting a perennial root of danger and sorrow.  The child may cry and sob at the time, and afterward feel uncomfortable in the presence of one whose superiority has been made the means of worrying her; and, if envious by nature, she will probably take the first opportunity of pointing out to the teachers any little error of her sister’s.  The permanent injury, however, remains to be effected when they both grow to woman’s estate; the envious sister will then take every artful opportunity of lessening the influence of the one who is considered her superior, of insinuating charges against her to those whose good opinion they both value the most.  And she is only too easily successful; she is successful, that success may bring upon her the penalty of her sin, for Heaven is then the most incensed against us when our sin appears to prosper.  Various and inexhaustible are the mere temporal punishments of this sin of envy; of the sin which deprives another of even one shade of the influence, admiration, and affection, they would otherwise have enjoyed.