Making Progress.
“I care not how lone in this world I may be,
So long as the Master remembereth me.”
Helen Monro.
“So sure as our sweet Lady, Saint Mary, worketh miracles at Walsingham, never was poor woman so be-plagued as I, with an ill, ne’er-do-well, good-for-nought, thankless hussy, picked up out of the mire in the gutter! Where be thy wits, thou gadabout? Didst leave them at the Cross yester-morrow? Go thither and seek for them! for ne’er a barley crust shalt thou break this even in this house, or my name is not Martha Winter!”
And, snatching up a broom, Mistress Winter hunted Agnes out of doors, and slammed the door behind her.
It was not altogether a new thing for Agnes to be turned out into the street for the night, and Mistress Winter reserved it as her most tremendous penalty. Perhaps, had she known how Agnes regarded it, she might have invented a new one. These occasions were her times of recreation, when she usually took refuge with good-natured Mistress Flint, who was always ready to give Agnes a supper and a share of her girls’ bed. A few hours in the cheerful company of the Flints was a real refreshment to the hard-worked and ever-abused drudge. But this time she did not at once seek Mistress Flint. She walked, as Mistress Winter had amiably suggested, straight to the now deserted Cross, and sat down on one of its stone steps. It would not be dark yet for another hour, and until the gathering dusk warned her to return, Agnes meant to stay there. She was feeling very sad and perplexed. The glory in which the world had been steeped only yesterday had grown pale and grey. The cares of the world had come in. Poor Agnes had set out that morning with a firm determination to serve God throughout the day. Her idea of service consisted in the ceaseless mental repetition of forms of prayer. Busy with her Aves and Paternosters, she had forgotten to shut the oven door, and a baking of bread had been spoiled. She sat now mournfully wondering how any one in her position could serve God. If such mischances as this were always to happen, she could never get through her work. And the work must be done. Mistress Winter was one of the last people in the world to permit religion to take precedence of housewifery. How then was poor Agnes ever to “make her salvation” at all?
The mistake was natural enough. All her life she had walked in the mist of self-righteousness; her teachers had carefully led her into it. Starting from the idea that man had to merit God’s favour, was it any wonder that, when told that God loved her already, she still fancied that, in order to retain that love, she must do something to deserve it? The new piece was sewn on the old garment, and the rent was made worse.
But now, must she give up the glad thought of being loved? If serving God, as she understood that service, made her neglect
her every-day duties, what then? How was she ever to serve God? It was a misfortune for Agnes that she had heard only half of the Friar’s sermon. The other half would have removed her difficulties.
She had reached this point in her perplexed thoughts, when she was startled by a voice inquiring—