med so good
about him was not all outside; no, the fine covering had a still finer
lining. Upon one hand he wore a white kid glove, but the other hand,
which was ungloved, looked hardly less white. Now, as the Fidele, like
most steamboats, was upon deck a little soot-streaked here and there,
especially about the railings, it was marvel how, under such
circumstances, these hands retained their spotlessness. But, if you
watched them a while, you noticed that they avoided touching anything;
you noticed, in short, that a certain negro body-servant, whose hands
nature had dyed black, perhaps with the same purpose that millers wear
white, this negro servant's hands did most of his master's handling for
him; having to do with dirt on his account, but not to his prejudices.
But if, with the same undefiledness of consequences to himself, a
gentleman could also sin by deputy, how shocking would that be! But it
is not permitted to be; and even if it were, no judicious moralist would
make proclamation of it.

This gentleman, therefore, there is reason to affirm, was one who, like
the Hebrew governor, knew how to keep his hands clean, and who never in
his life happened to be run suddenly against by hurrying house-painter,
or sweep; in a word, one whose very good luck it was to be a very good
man.

Not that he looked as if he were a kind of Wilberforce at all; that
superior merit, probably, was not his; nothing in his manner bespoke him
righteous, but only good, and though to be good is much below being
righteous, and though there is a difference between the two, yet not, it
is to be hoped, so incompatible as that a righteous man can not be a
good man; though, conversely, in the pulpit it has been with much
cogency urged, that a merely good man, that is, one good merely by his
nature, is so far from there by being righteous, that nothing short of a
total change and conversion can make him so; which is something which no
honest mind, well read in the history of righteousness, will care to
deny; nevertheless, since St. Paul himself, agreeing in a sense with the
pulpit distinction, though not altogether in the pulpit deduction, and
also pretty plainly intimating which of the two qualities in question
enjoys his apostolic preference; I say, since St. Paul has so meaningly
said, that, "scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure
for a good man some would even dare to die;" therefore, when we repeat
of this gentleman, tha