Some souls may be purified by fire, doubtless, as the old Greeks cleansed their asbestos fabrics; but we should be wary how we thrust our fellows into the furnace, for no base tissue will stand the fire, and a soul, to emerge unsmirched and undestroyed, must be of strong fibre indeed.
CHAPTER IV.
"O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,
Who may be saved? Who is it may be saved?
Who may be made a saint if I fail here?"
"As who should say: 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!'"
There are doubtless a few of us in the world capable of judging and pronouncing sentence upon the rest.
It is unfortunately inevitable, however, that such capabilities remain forever underestimated, and the possessors rarely receive the acknowledgments due from an ungrateful world.
Mrs. Deans was one of the chosen few who recognize their own infallibility, and accept as a sacred trust the knowledge that they are indispensable. To be a god, Mrs. Deans only lacked the minor attribute of immortality—a want of which she was herself unconscious.
Mrs. Deans strove earnestly to better her neighbors and cause them to conform to her standards of what was right. She was a firm believer that "open rebuke is better than secret love," and whatever risk Myron ran, under Mrs. Deans' rule she incurred no danger of being "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease"—a thing much to be dreaded. Nor was there any possibility of her forgetting, for a half-hour at a time, the light in which Mrs. Deans viewed her, which was, of course, the somewhat trying illumination that the Children of Light project upon the Children of Darkness.
Mrs. Deans had a modestly good opinion of herself. "Thou art the salt of the earth" impressed her with all the directness of a personal remark. Those who enjoyed the privileges of Mrs. Deans' household were, first and least, her husband—Henry Deans. He was a small man, with "a little wee face, with a little yellow beard, a Cain-colored beard." It was five years since his horses, running away as he returned from the market town, capsized him over a steep bank, down which the barrel of salt he had bought rolled also, and, striking him in the back, partially paralyzed him.