t with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice,
images of God indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The
constant pressure, through numberless generations, of conditions of
life which might have perverted angels, had not been able to
essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and these
conditions once removed, like a bent tree, it had sprung back to its
normal uprightness.

"To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me compare
humanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, watered
with black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled
with poison dews at night. Innumerable generations of gardeners had
done their best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened
bud with a worm at the heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful.
Many, indeed, claimed that the bush was no rosebush at all, but a
noxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners, for
the most part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose
family, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the
buds from coming out, and accounted for its generally sickly
condition. There were a few, indeed, who maintained that the stock was
good enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that under more
favorable conditions the plant might be expected to do better. But
these persons were not regular gardeners, and being condemned by the
latter as mere theorists and day dreamers, were for the most part, so
regarded by the people. Moreover, urged some eminent moral
philosophers, even conceding for the sake of the argument that the
bush might possibly do better elsewhere, it was a more valuable
discipline for the buds to try to bloom in a bog than it would be
under more favorable conditions. The buds that succeeded in opening
might indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, but
they represented far more moral effort than if they had bloomed
spontaneously in a garden.

"The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. The
bush remained rooted in the bog, and the old course of treatment went
on. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures were applied to the
roots, and more recipes than could be numbered, each declared by its
advocates the best and only suitable preparation, were used to kill
the vermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time.
Occasionally some one claimed to observe a slight improvement in the