She stopped: she was on the point of going too far, she thought. "So long as what?" he returned sternly. "So long as you are a worshipper of Mammon," she answered; and left the room. She burst out crying when she came to this point. She had narrated the whole with the air of one making a confession. "I am afraid it was very wrong," she said; "and if so, then it was very rude as well. But something seemed to force it out of me. Just think: there was a generous heart, clogged up with self-importance and wealth! To me, as he stood there on the hearth-rug, he was a most pitiable object--with an impervious wall betwixt him and the kingdom of heaven! He seemed like a man in a terrible dream, from which I _must_ awake him by calling aloud in his ear--except that, alas! the dream was not terrible to him, only to me! If he had been one of my poor friends, guilty of some plain fault, I should have told him so without compunction; and why not, being what he was? There he stood,--a man of estimable qualities, of beneficence, if not bounty; no miser, nor consciously unjust; yet a man whose heart the moth and rust were eating into a sponge!--who went to church every Sunday, and had many friends, not one of whom, not even his own wife, would tell him that he was a Mammon-worshipper, and losing his life. It may have been useless, it may have been wrong; but I felt driven to it by bare human pity for the misery I saw before me." "It looks to me as if you had the message given you to give him," I said. "But--though I don't know it--what if I was annoyed with him for offering me that wretched hundred pounds,--in doing which he was acting up to the light that was in him?" I could not help thinking of the light which is darkness, but I did not say so. Strange tableau, in this our would-be grand nineteenth century,--a young and poor woman prophet-like rebuking a wealthy London merchant on his own hearth-rug, as a worshipper of Mammon! I think she was right; not because he was wrong, but because, as I firmly believe, she did it from no personal motives whatever, although in her modesty she doubted herself. I believe it was from pure regard for the man and for the truth, urging her to an irrepressible utterance. If so, should we not say that she spoke by the Spirit? Only I shudder to think what utterance might, with an equal outward show, be attributed to the same Spirit. Well, to his own master every one standeth or falleth; whether an old prophet who, with a lie in his right hand, entraps an honorable guest, or a young prophet who, with repentance in his heart, walks calmly into the jaws of the waiting lion. [Footnote: See the Sermons of the Rev. Henry Whitehead, vicar of St. John's, Limehouse; as remarkable for the profundity of their insight us for the noble severity of their literary modelling.--G.M.D.]