Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance
of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain time
is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people. As you go
down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the common talk
in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual
vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the miserable
sufferer.
And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the
one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get
along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their
goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children
cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in
the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
right.
This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which could not
be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are made of them by
those who ought to know what they mean.
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