They are the
mysterious problem of life to more than him. He wondered if any in
all the hurrying crowd had come from such a house of mourning. He
thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them. But he
could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by
in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives;
the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting,
sinking under? You may be elbowed one instant by the girl desperate
in her abandonment, laughing in mad merriment with her outward
gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead, and
bringing itself to think of the cold flowing river as the only mercy
of God remaining to her here. You may pass the criminal, meditating
crimes at which you will to-morrow shudder with horror as you read
them. You may push against one, humble and unnoticed, the last upon
earth, who in heaven will for ever be in the immediate light of
God's countenance. Errands of mercy--errands of sin--did you ever
think where all the thousands of people you daily meet are bound?
Barton's was an errand of mercy; but the thoughts of his heart were
touched by sin, by bitter hatred of the happy, whom he, for the
time, confounded with the selfish.
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