ven his revenges
never-reached further than the making of his enemies ashamed.

It was the spirit of help, then, that had urged him into the profession
he followed. He had found much dirt about the door of it, and had not
been able to cross the threshold without some cleaving to his garments.
He is a high-souled youth indeed, in whom the low regards and corrupt
knowledge of his superiors will fail utterly of degrading influence; he
must be one stronger than Faber who can listen to scoffing materialism
from the lips of authority and experience, and not come to look upon
humanity and life with a less reverent regard. What man can learn to
look upon the dying as so much matter about to be rekneaded and
remodeled into a fresh mass of feverous joys, futile aspirations, and
stinging chagrins, without a self-contempt from which there is no
shelter but the poor hope that we may be a little better than we appear
to ourselves. But Faber escaped the worst. He did not learn to look on
humanity without respect, or to meet the stare of appealing eyes from
man or animal, without genuine response--without sympathy. He never
joined in any jest over suffering, not to say betted on the chance of
the man who lay panting under the terrors of an impending operation. Can
one be capable of such things, and not have sunk deep indeed in the
putrid pit of decomposing humanity? It is true that before he began to
practice, Faber had come to regard man as a body and not an embodiment,
the highest in him as dependent on his physical organization--as indeed
but the aroma, as it were, of its blossom the brain, therefore subject
to _all_ the vicissitudes of the human plant from which it rises; but he
had been touched to issues too fine to be absolutely interpenetrated and
inslaved by the reaction of accepted theories. His poetic nature, like
the indwelling fire of the world, was ever ready to play havoc with
induration and constriction, and the same moment when degrading
influences ceased to operate, the delicacy of his feeling began to
revive. Even at its lowest, this delicacy preserved him from much into
which vulgar natures plunge; it kept alive the memory of a lovely
mother; and fed the flame of that wondering, worshiping reverence for
women which is the saviour of men until the Truth Himself saves both. A
few years of worthy labor in his profession had done much to develop
him, and his character for uprightness, benevolence, and skill, with the
peo