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The humbler class, upon whom the election largely depended, were captivated by his eloquence, his insidious manipulation of the best in their natures, filling them with a judicious mixture of ideals and self-approval; while the phenomenon he invariably presented on the platform of the gradual awakening into life of a warm-blooded generous magnetic and earnest inner man, so effectually concealed at other times within a repellent exterior, never failed to induce in them the belief that something responsive in their own personalities awakened that rare spirit from its stifled sleep.
Neither man had been in the least deceived, but the honours of the game were with the big man in the bed, which creaked under his weight as he fell back grinning in pleased self-approval. "Damn that black cuss," he muttered, "and the preacher too. I'll make them sorry." At the outer doorstep Mark Rivers stood still and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
They sop up literature or facts as a sponge sops up water; then, like human sponges, do nothing with their wisdom. They read for themselves; they read to increase their egotism and self-approval, and for no other purpose. But, after walking into an intellectual parlor above our station in life, it certainly does not become us to be finicky.
"Well done, that!" said the corporal, exultingly, and half-aloud to himself, as he slapped his thigh, in a manner to denote his own self-approval. "That's what I call doing the business as it should be done. The attempt," and he smiled at the conceit, "was not a bootless one to us all, though it has been a BOOT LESS one to ME."
But a few short years ago the passer on the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds, without an emotion of self-approval. But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the superabundance to come.
One has shrewdly to examine his fellow men from this angle: "Does he work up his own steam; are his boilers of energy heated by his own enthusiasm and his own self-approval? Or does he borrow; can he work only if others add their fire to his; does his light go out if his neighbors turn away or are too busy to help him?"
He paused with a sly, mean smile of self-approval and conceit, and his tongue licked the corners of his mouth in a way that drunkards have in the early morning when the effect of last night's drinking has worn off. He spread out his hands with the air of a man who had unpacked his soul, but the chief characteristic of his manner was egregious belief in himself.
For his sake she had not married! In this rush of self-approval she sat up, and looked blindly off over the orchard below her at the distant hills, blue and slumberous in the sunshine.
Two matters of detail preserved his spirits. For, first, he had still an infinity of business to transact; and to transact business, for a man of Otto's neglectful and procrastinating habits, is the best anodyne for conscience. All afternoon he was hard at it with the Chancellor, reading, dictating, signing, and despatching papers; and this kept him in a glow of self-approval.
So the holy Name of God, which alone should be honored, is taken in vain and dishonored through our own cursed name, self-approval and honor-seeking. And this sin is more grievous before God than murder and adultery; but its wickedness is not so clearly seen as that of murder, because of its subtilty, for it is not accomplished in the coarse flesh, but in the spirit.
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