I can sympathize with you;--not a whit more or less am I capable of.
I am the merest beginner and dabbler in doing right myself, and have
more need to ask you to teach me than to set up for teaching you."

"That's the beauty of you!--excuse me, sir," cried the draper
triumphantly. "You don't pretend to teach us anything, but you make
us so uncomfortable that we go about ever after asking ourselves
what we ought to do. Till last Sunday, I had always looked upon
myself as an honest man: let me see: it would be more correct to say
I looked on myself as a man QUITE HONEST ENOUGH. That I do not feel
so now, is your doing, sir. You said in your sermon last Sunday, and
specially to business men: 'Do you do to your neighbour as you would
have your neighbour do to you? If not, how can you suppose that the
lord of Christians will acknowledge you as a disciple of his, that
is, as a Christian?' Now I was even surer of being a Christian than
of being an honest man. You will hardly believe it, and what to
think of it myself I now hardly know, but I had satisfied myself,
more or less, that I had gone through all the necessary stages of
being born again, and it is now many years since I was received into
a Christian church--dissenting of course, I mean; for what I count
the most important difference after all between church and dissent
is that the one, right or wrong, requires for communion a personal
profession of faith, and credible proof of conversion--which I
believed I gave them, and have been for years, I shame to say it,
one of the deacons of that community. But it shall not be for long.
To return to my story, however: I was indignant at being called upon
from a church-pulpit to raise in myself the question whether or not
I was a Christian;--for had I not put my faith in the--? But I will
avoid theology, for I have paid more regard to that than has proved
good for me. Suffice it to say that I was now driven from the tests