deal more; and in very many human beings, proper management might have
brought out qualities essentially different from those which these
beings now possess. It is not merely that they are rough diamonds, which
might have been polished into blazing ones,--not merely that they are
thoroughbred colts drawing coal-carts, which with fair training would
have been new Eclipses: it is that they are vinegar which might have
been wine, poison which might have been food, wild-cats which might have
been harmless lambs, soured miserable wretches who might have been happy
and useful, almost devils who might have been but a little lower than
the angels. Oh, the unutterable sadness that is in the thought of what
might have been!

Not always, indeed. Sometimes, as we look back, it is with deep
thankfulness that we see the point at which we were (we cannot say how)
inclined to take the right turning, when we were all but resolved to
take that which we can now see would have landed us in wreck and ruin.
And it is fit that we should correct any morbid tendency to brood upon
the fancy of how much better we might have been, by remembering also how
much worse we might have been. Sometimes the present state of matters,
good or bad, is the result of long training, of influences that were at
work through many years, and that produced their effect so gradually
that we never remarked the steps of the process, till some day we waken
up to a sense of the fact, and find ourselves perhaps a great deal
better, probably a great deal worse, than we had been vaguely imagining.
But the case is not unfrequently otherwise. Sometimes one testing-time
decided whether we should go to the left or to the right. There are in
the moral world things analogous to the sudden accident which makes a
man blind or lame for life: in an instant there is wrought a permanent
deterioration. Perhaps a few minutes before man or woman took the step
which can never be retraced, which must banish forever from all they