The man or the woman was
still man or woman, mother or husband to them. Nothing could degrade
them beyond the reach of their sympathies! They had no thought of
priding themselves against them because they themselves had not
transgressed the law, neither of drawing back from them with disgust.
And were there not a thousand wrong things done in business and society
which had no depressing effect either on those who did them, or those
whose friends did them--only because these wrongs not having yet come
under the cognizance of law had not yet come to be considered
disgraceful? Therewith she felt nearer to her poor than ever before, and
it comforted her. The bare soul of humanity comforted her. She was not
merely of the same flesh and blood with them--not even of the same soul
and spirit only, but of the same failing, sinning, blundering breed; and
that not alone in the general way of sin, ever and again forsaking the
fountain of living water, and betaking herself to some cistern, but in
their individual sins was she not their near relative? Their shame was
hers: the son of her mother, the son of her father was a thief! She was
and would be more one with them than ever before! If they made less of
crime in another, they also made less of innocence from it in
themselves! Was it not even better to do wrong, she asked herself, than
to think it a very grand thing not to do it? What merit was there in
being what it would be contemptible not to be? The Lord Christ could get
nearer to the publican than the Pharisee, to the woman that was a sinner
than the self-righteous honest woman! The Pharisee was a good man, but
he thought it such a fine thing to be good that God did not like him
nearly so well as the other who thought it a sad thing to be bad! Let
her but get among her nice, honest, wicked poor ones, out of this
atmosphere of pretence and appearance, and she would breathe again! She
dropped upon her knees, and cried to her Father in heaven to make her
heart clean altogether, to deliver her from everything mean and
faithless, to make her turn from any shadow of ill as thoroughly as she
would have her brother repent of the stealing that made them all so
ashamed.
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