It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.
The next point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him.
The key to the whole thing is _obedience_, and nothing else.
What the gift of such an instructor was to Joseph, my reader may be requested to imagine.

He was like a man seated on the grass outside the heavenly gate, from which, slow-opening every evening as the sun went down, came an angel to teach, and teach, until he too should be fit to enter in: an hour would arrive when she would no longer have to come out to him where he sat.

Under such an influence all that was gentlest and sweetest in his nature might well develop with rapidity, and every accidental roughness--and in him there was no other--by swift degrees vanish from both speech and manners.

The angels do not want tailors to make their clothes: their habits come out of themselves.

But we are often too hard upon our fellows; for many of those in the higher ranks of life--no, no, I mean of society--whose insolence wakens ours, as growl wakes growl in the forest, are not yet so far removed from the savage--I mean in their personal history--as some in the lowest ranks.
When a nobleman mistakes the love of right in another for a hatred of refinement, he can not be far from mistaking insolence for good manners.