depravity is all the more difficult to discern, because its manifestations are checked and cloaked by public order, as enforced by law; by the necessity of having a good name; and even by ordinary polite manners. And this is not all. People commonly suppose that in the education of the young their moral interests are furthered by representing uprightness and virtue as principles generally followed by the world. Later on, it is often to their great harm that experience teaches them something else; for the discovery, that the instructors of their early years were the first to deceive them, is likely to have a more mischievous effect on their morality than if these persons had given them the first example of ingenuous truthfulness, by saying frankly: “The world is sunk in evil, and men are not what they ought to be; but be not misled thereby, and see