cast out of your mortal father's house, starving, helpless,
heartbroken; and that every morning when you went into your father's
room, you said to him, "How good you are, father, to give me what
you don't give Lucy," are you sure that, whatever anger your parent
might have just cause for, against your sister, he would be pleased
by that thanksgiving, or flattered by that praise? Nay, are you
even sure that you ARE so much the favourite?--suppose that, all
this while, he loves poor Lucy just as well as you, and is only
trying you through her pain, and perhaps not angry with her in
anywise, but deeply angry with you, and all the more for your
thanksgivings? Would it not be well that you should think, and
earnestly too, over this standing of yours; and all the more if you
wish to believe that text, which clergymen so much dislike preaching
on, "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom
of God"? You do not believe it now, or you would be less complacent
in your state; and you cannot believe it at all, until you know that
the Kingdom of God means,--"not meat and drink, but justice, peace,
and joy in the Holy Ghost," nor until you know also that such joy is
not by any means, necessarily, in going to church, or in singing
hymns; but may be joy in a dance, or joy in a jest, or joy in
anything you have deserved to possess, or that you are willing to
give; but joy in nothing that separates you, as by any strange
favour, from your fellow-creatures, that exalts you through their
degradation--exempts you from their toil--or indulges you in time of
their distress.

Think, then, and some day, I believe, you will feel also,--no morbid
passion of pity such as would turn you into a black Sister of
Charity, but the steady fire of perpetual kindness which will make
you a bright one. I speak in no disparagement of them; I know well