"O dear!" said Lottie. "I'm not fit to counsel a downy chicken. I wish you didn't take this matter so to heart You look as if I might be your executioner." "You can be my faithful surgeon and do some wholesome cutting." "Well," said Lottie, dismally. "I'd rather give you ether or laughing-gas first." "That is more kind than wise," he replied, smiling; "in moral and mental surgery the patient should have all his faculties." "There!" she exclaimed with animation, "we are illustrating by contrast my chief complaint against your preaching. When you told me my faults you did so gently, and appeared pained in giving me pain; and now I am honestly sorry to say words that I know will hurt you. And I know my words will hurt and discourage you; for if the trouble were in you it might be remedied, but it is in what you teach, and of course you teach what you believe, and won't say smooth things, as I fear other ministers do sometimes. You represented God calm and unchangeable as fate, as unrelenting and unimpassioned. In this spirit you portrayed Him taking up one life after another and putting it into the furnace of affliction, to see what He can make of it. You illustrated His manner of doing this by the sculptor with his cold, unfeeling marble, by the refiner with crude ore, and by the surgeon, and you forgot to say that the last stupefies his patients before cutting. You gave me the impression that as soon as God set about making us better we should find ourselves in trouble, and that, like certain school-masters of the old regime, He had faith in nothing save the rod. You know the natural feeling of children towards such pedagogues. How can we help feeling hi the same way towards God? Then you presented God as full of inflexible purposes, but the oftener you told us that we could not help ourselves, and that there was no use in resisting, the move I felt like resisting. The idea of cutting and carving character out of quivering human hearts as if they were marble! The idea of putting one, like a lump of ore, into a crucible, and then coolly sitting by to see what becomes of it! I'm not a lump of ore, and if I need harsh treatment I want it done sympathetically, feelingly, or I shall become a Tartar instead of a saint. The tears in your eyes the other night, Mr. Hemstead, did me more good than all your wise words." Hemstead looked as if a light were dawning upon him.