ithholding of a fact, simply because she disliked to mention it,
seemed to her akin to a denial of it. If there is such a thing in a human
being as organic honesty,--an honesty which makes a lie not difficult, but
impossible, just as it is impossible for men to walk on ceilings like
flies, or to breathe in water like fishes,--Mercy Philbrick had it. The
least approach to an equivocation was abhorrent to her: not that she
reasoned about it, and submitting it to her conscience found it wicked,
and therefore hateful; but that she disliked it instinctively,--as
instinctively as she disliked pain. Her moral nerves shrank from it, just
as nerves of the body shrink from suffering; and she recoiled from the
suggestion of such a thing with the same involuntary quickness with which
we put up the hand to ward off a falling blow, or drop the eyelid to
protect an endangered eye. Physicians tell us that there are in men and
women such enormous differences in this matter of sensitiveness to
physical pain that one person may die of a pain which would be
comparatively slight to another; and this is a fact which has to be taken
very carefully into account, in all dealing with disease in people of the
greatest capacity for suffering. May there not be equally great
differences in souls, in the matter of sensitiveness to moral
hurt?--differences for which the soul is not responsible, any more than
the body is responsible for its skin's having been made thin or thick.
Will-power has nothing whatever to do with determining the latter
conditions. Let us be careful how far we take it to task for failing to
control the others. Perhaps we shall learn, in some other stage of
existence, that there is in this world a great deal of moral color
blindness, congenital, incurable; and that God has much more pity than we
suppose for poor things who have stumbled a good many times while they
were groping in darkness.

People who see clearly themselves are almost always intolerant of those
who do not. We often see this ludicrously exemplified, even in the trivial
matter of near-sightedness. We are almost always a little vexed, when we
point out a distant object to a friend, and hear him reply,--

"No, I do not see it at all. I am near-sighted."

"What! can't you see that far?" is the frequent retort, and in the pity is
a dash of impatience.

There is a great deal of intolerance in the world, which is closely akin
to this; and not a whit more reasonable o