Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. Hard
almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to
contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward
his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong;
savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that
wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with any
true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet,
examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with
the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit which
said of old, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of
resentment" which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the
Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not
against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than
as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and
springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic
in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the
realities of existence.
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