e a parable of two women.

Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed of a power of
moral principle that impresses one even as sublime. All her perceptions
of right and wrong are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to
the poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and earnestly
religious. In all the minutiae of woman's life she manifests an
inconceivable precision and perfection. Everything she does is perfectly
done. She is true to all her promises to the very letter, and so
punctual that railroad time might be kept by her instead of a
chronometer.

Yet, with all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast has not the faculty
of making a happy home. She is that most hopeless of fault-finders,--a
fault-finder from principle. She has a high, correct standard for
everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the
spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact
standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She
does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises
over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault;
she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing
in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her reproofs are
aimed with a true and steady point, and sent with a force that makes
them felt by the most obdurate.

Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and seldom or never
scolds, yet she drives every one around her to despair by the use of the
calmest and most elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love
her. Her husband, an impulsive, generous man, somewhat inconsiderate and
careless in his habits, is at times perfectly desperate under the
accumulated load of her disapprobation. Her children regard her as
inhabiting some high, distant, unapproachable mountain-top of goodness,
whence she is always looking down with reproving eyes on naughty boys
and girls. They wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should have
children who, let them try to be good as hard as they can, are always
sure to do something dreadful every day.

The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has a high standard,
and not that she purposes and means to bring every one up to it, but
that she does not take the right way. She has set it down that to blame
a wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has never learned that
it is as much her duty to praise as to blame, a