God seems to take pleasure in working by degrees. The progress of the truth is as the permeation of leaven, or the growth of a seed. A multitude of successive small sacrifices may work more good in the world than many a large one. What would even our Lord’s death on the cross have been except as the crown of a life in which he died daily, giving himself, soul, body, and spirit, to his men and women? It is the Being that is precious.

Being is the mother to all little Doings as well as the grown-up Deeds and the mighty heroic Sacrifice. Hester had not had time, neither had she prayed enough to be quite yet, though she was growing well toward it. She was a good way up the hill, and the Lord was coming down to meet her, but they had not quite met yet so as to go up the rest of the way together.

In religious politics, Hester was what is called a good churchwoman, which in truth means a sectarian. She looked down upon those of all dissenting churches as from a superior social standing—that is, with the judgment of this world, and not that of Christ the carpenter’s son. So she was scarcely in the kingdom of heaven yet, any more than thousands who regard themselves as good Christians. I do not say these feelings were especially active in her, but she did not love her dissenting neighbour as herself.

I well know that many good dissenters are equally and in precisely the same way sectarians, that is bad Christians. For my part I would rather cut off my right hand than be so cased and in a narrow garment of pride and satisfaction if I were condemned to keep company with myself instead of the Master as he goes everywhere—into the poorest companies of them that love each other, and so invite his presence.

The Lord of truth and beauty has died for us. Shall we turn up a Pharisaical nose toward our brothers and sisters? Casting from us our own faults first, let us cast from us and from him our neighbour’s also.

That Hester’s exclusiveness in favour of the Church of England was simply a form of that pride, justify or explain it as you will, which found its fullest embodiment in the Jewish Pharisee—the evil thing that Christ came to burn up with his lovely fire, and which yet so many of us who call ourselves by his name keep hugging to our bosoms—I mean the pride that says, “I am better than thou.” If there be any who is in any true sense below us, it is Christ’s call upon us to stoop and lay hold of and lift the sister soul nearer to the heart of the divine tenderness.

This tenderness, which has its roots in every human heart, had larger roots in the heart of Hester than in most. Whatever her failings, whatever ugly weeds grew in the neglected corners of her nature, the moment she came in contact with any of her kind in whatever condition of sadness or need, the pent-up love of God—I mean the love that came of God and was divine in her—would burst its barriers—even the barriers of her sectarian prejudices—and rush forth, sometimes almost overwhelming herself in its torrent. She would then be ready to die, nothing less, to help the poor and miserable.