ntil her feet were bleeding and her
exhausted form could scarcely drag itself along the dreadful miles. But
on she pressed, until she saw the lights of London town; and still on,
overcoming every barrier, until she stood before the Queen. And then she
pleaded, as no mere advocate could plead, for Effie. With what passion,
what entreaties, what tears did she besiege the throne! And, before the
tempest of her grief and eloquence, the Queen yielded completely and
gave her her sister's life. To Jeanie Deans and to Michael Trevanion
there came the same terrible ordeal; but Jeanie stood where Michael
fell. That was the _first_ of his two mistakes.

The _second_ was that _he thought that spiritual results could be
engineered_. He fancied that souls could be saved by wire-pulling.

'Robert,' he said, on the day of his death and of his bitter confession,
'Robert, I have sinned, although it was for the Lord's sake, and He has
rebuked me. I thought to take upon myself the direction of His affairs;
but He is wiser than I. I believed I was sure of His will, but I was
mistaken. He knows that what I did, I did for the love of your soul, my
child; but I was grievously wrong.'

'The father,' says Mark Rutherford, 'humbled himself before the son, but
in his humiliation became majestic; and, in after years, when he was
dead and gone, there was no scene in the long intercourse with him which
lived with a brighter and fairer light in the son's memory.'

III

And so Michael Trevanion sinned and suffered for his sin! For my part, I
have no stones to cast at him. I would rather sit at his feet and learn
the golden lesson of his life. For love--and especially the love of an
earnest man for another's soul--covers a multitude of sins. There come
to all of us mountain moments, moments in which we stand on the higher
altitudes and catch a glimpse of the unutterable preciousness of a human
soul. But we are disobedient to the heavenly vision. We are like
Augustine Saint Clare in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. He could never forget, he
said, the words with which his mother impressed upon him the dignity and
worth of the souls of the slaves. Those passionate sentences of hers
seemed to have burnt themselves into his brain. 'I have looked into her
face with solemn awe,' he told Miss Ophelia, 'when she pointed to the
stars in the evening and said to me, "See there, Auguste! the poorest,
meanest soul on our place will be living when all those stars are gone