nd that, of course, is
right; but I don't see how feeling and acting like a Christian takes
away one's natural feeling about being slighted and ill-treated by
others."

"Perhaps it does not. I sometimes think one's sensibilities are greatly
intensified by leading the better life. A Christian, in trying to bring
his own character up to the point of perfect love and honor, often
becomes exacting of such perfection in others, and failing to find it,
feels exquisite pain. Yet the pain will oftener be because God's great
principles of right are violated, than that his personal feelings are
hurt. Which is easier for you, child, to be wounded in personal feeling,
or to see what is wrong against God?"

"I never thought exactly; it is dreadful to see the wrong, but one feels
in the other a sense of shame--feels so wronged--it is quite different."

"My precious one," said Mrs. Jones, "when you have so learned the love
of God as to know no difference between the interests and the honor of
his law, and your own comfort and pleasure and good name, you will see
more clearly how this is, and feel, it is likely, the sense of shame and
wrong in a different way."

"But, mother, haven't we a right to feel hurt when we are wronged or
slighted--I mean personally hurt?"

"Yes; but may be if we looked a little deeper into the principles of
things, or our own principles, we should not suffer so much. What is the
secret of your feeling hurt by the Wilsons? Does the slight make your
real self in any respect less or worse? Does it injure you in the
estimation of others?"

"Why no, mother, I suppose not; but I am as good and as much respected
as they are; and I don't like to have it seem that I am beneath them
because I am not so rich, and all that."

"My dear, I believe we have talked this subject over before, and long
ago understood that we desire no position, no companionship which is not
ours by right of moral and intellectual character.

"It is the Christian principle to live in all things for the true and
the right; to be willing to take our own place in business and society,
and fill it well; to think less of what others think of us than of what
we in ourselves are; to appear to be only what we are, and be willing to
appear thus while we are always looking up to something wiser, and
lovelier, and better.

"I never could get the idea of a Christian's being above or beneath any
one in the sense you mean. His associations are, or sh