Page:Elizabeth Fry (Pitman 1884).djvu/149

 “nervously” because here and there, up and down the pages of her journal, are scattered numerous passages full of such questions as the above. None ever peered into their hearts, or searched their lives more relentlessly than she did. Upright, self-denying, just, pure, charitable, “hoping all things, bearing all things, believing all things,” she judged herself by a stricter law than she judged others; condemning in herself what she allowed to be expedient, if not lawful, in others, and laying bare her inmost heart before her God. After she had done all that she judged it to be her duty to do, she humbly and tearfully acknowledged herself to be one of the Lord’s most “unprofitable servants.” It would be useless to endeavour to measure such a life by any rules of worldly polity or fashion. An extract written at this time, relative to the welfare and treatment of servants, may be of use in showing how she permitted her sound sense and practical daily piety to decide for her in emergencies and anxieties growing out of the “mistress and servant” question. “At this time there is no set of people I feel so much about as servants; as I do not think they have generally justice done to them. They are too much considered as another race of beings, and we are apt to forget that the holy injunction holds good with them: ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ I believe in striving to do so we shall not take them out of their station in life, but endeavour to render them happy and contented in it, and be truly their friends, though not their familiars or equals, as to the things of this life. We have reason to believe that the difference in our stations is ordered by a wiser than ourselves, who directs us how to fill our different places; but we must