ed back, and we who
were left found ourselves in the presence of four grave-looking
persons, like the board of examiners whom we remembered at college. We
were called up one by one. The work which had passed the first ordeal
was again looked into, and the quality of it compared with the talent
or faculty of the producer, to see how far he had done his
best,--whether anywhere he had done worse than he might have done and
knew how to have done; while besides, in a separate collection, were
the vices, the sins, the selfishnesses and ill-humors, with--in the
other scale--the acts of personal duty, of love and kindness and
charity, which had increased the happiness or lightened the sorrows of
those connected with him. These last, I observed, had generally been
forgotten by the owner, who saw them appear with surprise, and even
repudiated them with protest. In the work, of course, both material
and moral, there was every gradation both of kind and merit. But while
nothing was absolutely worthless, everything, even the highest
achievements of the greatest artist or the greatest saint, fell short
of absolute perfection. Each of us saw our own performances, from our
first ignorant beginnings to what we regarded as our greatest triumph;
and it was easy to trace how much of our faults were due to natural
deficiencies and the necessary failures of inexperience, and how much
to self-will or vanity or idleness. Some taint of mean motives,
too,--some desire of reward, desire of praise or honor or wealth, some
foolish self-satisfaction, when satisfaction ought not to have been
felt,--was to be seen infecting everything, even the very best which
was presented for scrutiny.

So plain was this that one of us, an earnest, impressive-looking
person, whose own work bore inspection better than that of most of us,
exclaimed passionately that so far as he was concerned the examiners
might spare their labor. From his earliest years he had known what he
ought to do, and in no instance had he ever completely done it. He had
struggled; he had conquered his grosser faults: but the farther he had
gone, and the better he had been able to do, his knowledge had still
grown faster than his power of acting upon it; and every additional
day that he had lived, his shortcomings had become more miserably
plain to him. Even if he could have reached perfection at last, he
could not undo the past, and the faults of his youth would bear
witness against him and c