The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to
feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there
among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that
you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night.
I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in
vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has
groped through as boy and man,--the slow, heavy years of
constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks
sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that
it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a
 Life in the Iron-Mills |