CHAPTER XXIV.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN.
The Methodist church to which Mrs.Matilda White and Miss Nancy Sawyer belonged was the leading one in Lewisburg, as it was in most county-seat villages in Indiana.

If I may be permitted to express my candid and charitable opinion of the difference between the two women, I shall have to use the old Quaker locution, and say that Miss Sawyer was a Methodist and likewise a Christian; Mrs.White was a Methodist, but I fear she was not likewise.
As to the first part of this assertion, there was no room to doubt Miss Nancy's piety.

She could get happy in class-meeting (for who had a better right ?), and could witness a good experience in the quarterly love-feast.

But it is not upon these grounds that I base my opinion of Miss Nancy.

Do not even the Pharisees the same?
She never dreamed that she had any right to speak of "Christian Perfection" (which, as Mrs.
Partington said of total depravity, is an excellent doctrine if it is lived up to); but when a woman's heart is full of devout affections and good purposes, when her head devises liberal and Christlike things, when her hands are always open to the poor and always busy with acts of love and self-denial, and when her feet are ever eager to run upon errands of mercy, why, if there be anything worthy of being called Christian Perfection in this world of imperfection, I do not know why such an one does not possess it.