households, unknown even to their own souls; but when the Lord comes
to build his New Jerusalem, we shall find many a white stone with a
new name thereon, and the record of deeds and words which only He that
seeth in secret knows. Many a humble soul will be amazed to find that
the seed it sowed in such weakness, in the dust of daily life, has
blossomed into immortal flowers under the eye of the Lord.

"When I build my cathedral, that woman," I said, pointing to a small
painting by the fire, "shall be among the first of my saints. You
see her there, in an every-day dress-cap with a mortal thread-lace
border, and with a very ordinary worked collar, fastened by a
visible and terrestrial breastpin. There is no nimbus around her
head, no sign of the cross upon her breast; her hands are clasped
on no crucifix or rosary. Her clear, keen, hazel eye looks as if it
could sparkle with mirthfulness, as in fact it could; there are in
it both the subtile flash of wit and the subdued light of humor;
and though the whole face smiles, it has yet a certain decisive
firmness that speaks the soul immutable in good. That woman shall be
the first saint in my cathedral, and her name shall be recorded as
Saint Esther. What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished
from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and
greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic. To
be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in
the insipid details of every-day life, is a virtue so rare as to be
worthy of canonization,--and this virtue was hers. New England
Puritanism must be credited with the making of many such women.
Severe as was her discipline, and harsh as seems now her rule, we
have yet to see whether women will be born of modern systems of
tolerance and indulgence equal to those grand ones of the olden
times whose places now know them no more. The inconceivable
austerity and solemnity with which Puritanism invested this mortal
life, the awful grandeur of the themes which it made household
words, the sublimity of the issues which it hung upon the commonest
acts of our earthly existence, created characters of more than Roman
strength and greatness; and the good men and women of Puritan
training excelled the saints of the Middle Ages, as a soul fully
developed intellectually, educated to closest thought, and exercised
in reasoning, is superior to a soul great merely through impulse
and sentiment.