Men of Iron (Iron Sharpens Iron, Part 2)

As with many things in my life, I have given more thought to a recent post. I left you, the reader, hanging, and on purpose I might add. I wanted to follow up with another piece that expands upon a point that I made, but did not elaborate upon, and also add some more commentary that I feel is of vital importance physically and spiritually. I felt that I did not have enough space to get to the heart of the matter and would like to cover that now.
Before we enter into the spiritual truths to be drawn from of iron, let’s cover some basic metallurgy. There are many different phases in iron, but there are three main phases that I will focus on, which are ferrite, cementite and pearlite (which is a mixture of ferrite and cementite, but for the sake of argument I’ll list as another phase). I suppose one could say that pearlite “proceeds” from the cementite (God the Father reference) and ferrite (Jesus the Son reference)…but I dare not open up the Filioque can of worms at this point.
Let us get back to metallurgy. Ferrite is a very soft phase that is almost pure iron and, while it does have a minute amount of carbon, it is essentially free of any other elements. This makes ferrite soft, malleable, and easy to deform – not soft like Silly Putty, but on a relative scale in the metals world, it is soft. Cementite, on the other hand, is an iron phase that is very rich in carbon. This makes it hard, brittle, and quite difficult to work with. If one had a bar of pure cementite and were to strike it with a hammer hard enough, it would shatter like glass into thousand pieces.
Soft or Hard?
Now that we have some properties