look through the rubbish of our imperfections, and see in us the
divine ideal of our natures, love in us not perhaps the men we are,
but the angels we may be in the evolution of the "sweet by and by,"
like the mother of St. Augustine, who, even while he was wild and
reckless, beheld him standing clothed in white a ministering priest at
the right hand of God.

They see through us as Michel Angelo saw through the block of marble,
declaring that an angel was imprisoned within it. They are soul
artists. They can never acknowledge our faults, only our divine
possibilities; so, when I left the academy, my parents, with strong
yearning and with tears, entreated me to become a minister. I had
not the heart to disappoint them and as one hypnotized, on a Sabbath
morning during that summer, the clergyman immersed me in the river,
while a wondering crowd watched from the shore. The very waters seemed
to protest, for as I gasped for breath at the cold backward plunge,
I imbibed copious draughts of the briny deep, and was well-nigh
strangled. I survived the ordeal, and that afternoon preached in the
church to nearly the entire population of the town on the "Final state
of the impenitent dead."

Oh, the terrors of this my first sermon, horrors to preacher as well
as to "preachees." As I sat in the pulpit beside our pastor, listening
to the tremulous tones of the organ which followed the prayer, and
gazing at the sea of upturned faces, they seemed taunting me with all
the wild pranks of my boyhood, and crying "Oh fool and hypocrite."

All my schoolmates were there shaking with ill-concealed merriment.
Every pore poured forth perspiration, and my hair seemed to stand on
end like quills upon the back of the fretful porcupine. I thought of