What I have just been describing is the action that is at the root of it; but with the individual it does not always take that form.

Often indeed it does; but oftener still perhaps it is discovered not in the helpless yet reluctant yielding to vice, but in the sadness and the despondency with which virtue is practised--in the dull leaden hours of blank endurance or of difficult endeavour; or in the little satisfaction that, when the struggle has ceased, the reward of struggle brings with it.
An earlier, and perhaps more general symptom still, is one that is not personal.

It consists not in the way in which men regard themselves, but in the way in which they regard others.

In their own case, their habitual desire of right, and their habitual aversion to wrong, may have been enough to keep them from any open breach with conscience, or from putting it to an open shame.

But its precarious position is revealed to them when they turn to others.