much perplexity,—­if you had refrained from saying such a hasty word,—­if you had not thoughtlessly made such a man your enemy!  Such a little thing may have changed the entire complexion of your life.  Ah, it was because the points were turned the wrong way at that junction, that you are now running along a line of railway through wild moorlands, leaving the warm champaign below ever more hopelessly behind.  Hastily, or pettedly, or despairingly, you took the wrong turning; or you might have been dwelling now amid verdant fields and silver waters in the country of contentment and success.  Many men and women, in the temporary bitterness of some disappointment, have hastily made marriages which will embitter all their future life,—­or which at least make it certain that in this world they will never know a joyous heart any more.  Men have died as almost briefless barristers, toiling into old age in heartless wrangling, who had their chance of high places on the bench, but ambitiously resolved to wait for something higher, and so missed the tide.  Men in the church have taken the wrong path at some critical time, and doomed themselves to all the pangs of disappointed ambition.  But I think a sincere man in the church has a great advantage over almost all ordinary disappointed men.  He has less temptation, reading affairs by the light of after-time, to look back with bitterness on any mistake he may have made.  For, if he be the man I mean, he took the decisive step not without seeking the best of guidance; and the whole training of his mind has fitted him for seeing a higher Hand in the allotment of human conditions.  And if a man acted for the best, according to the light he had, and if he truly believes that God puts all in their places in life, he may look back without bitterness upon what may appear the most grievous mistakes.  I must be suffered to add, that, if he is able heartily to hold certain great truths and to rest on certain sure promises, hardly any conceivable earthly lot should stamp him a soured or disappointed man.  If it be a sober truth, that “all things shall work together for good” to a certain order of mankind, and if the deepest sorrows in this world may serve to prepare us for a better,—­why, then, I think that one might hold by a certain ancient philosopher (and something more) who said, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

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You see, reader, that, in thinking of People of whom More might have been Made, we are limiting the scope of the subject.  I am not thinking how more might have been made of us originally.  No doubt, the potter had power over the clay.  Give a larger brain, of finer quality, and the commonplace man might have been a Milton.  A little change in the chemical composition of the gray matter of that little organ which is unquestionably connected with the mind’s working as no other organ of the body is, and, oh, what a different order of thought