"I see the steps," said the queen; "help me up!"
"Naught can avail but self-help. Each must learn to be monarch of himself, even though he wear a kingly crown. The law teaches us that, in order to retain this command over ourselves, we must not permit anger and hatred to dwell in our souls, or to poison so much of the world as is given us to enjoy, be our share great or small."
"I had too much faith in virtue and kindness."
"Very likely. As long as one believes in mankind, there will be deception and despair. We persist in judging our fellow-creatures by what they are as regards us, instead of what they are as regards themselves. And thus, as long as we believe in human virtue, we may, at times, be perplexed at finding ourselves disappointed where we least expect it. As soon, however, as we recognize the Divine in everything, even though the possessor himself is unconscious of it, we have attained a lofty standpoint, from which we feel sure both of ourselves and of the world."
The queen hurriedly raised herself and, extending both hands to Gunther, exclaimed:
"You are a worker of miracles."
"No, I am not that. I am only a physician who has held many a hand hot with fever, or stiff in death, in his own. The healing art might serve as an illustration. We help all who need our help, and do not stop to ask who they are, whence they come, or whether, when restored to health, they persist in their evil courses. Our actions are incomplete, fragmentary; thought alone is complete and all-embracing. Our deeds and ourselves are but fragments--the whole is God."
"I think I grasp your meaning. But our life, as you say, is indeed a mere fraction of life as a whole, and how is each one to bear up under the portion of suffering that falls to his individual lot? Can one--I mean it in its best sense--always be outside of one's-self?"
"I am well aware, Your Majesty, that passions and emotions cannot be regulated by ideas; for they grow in a different soil, or, to express myself correctly, move in entirely different spheres. It is but a few days since I closed the eyes of my old friend Eberhard. Even he never fully succeeded in subordinating his temperament to his philosophy; but, in his dying hour, he rose beyond the terrible grief that broke his heart--grief for his child. He summoned the thoughts of better hours to his aid--hours when his perception of the truth had been undimmed by sorrow or passion--and he died a noble, peaceful death. Your Majesty must still live and labor, elevating yourself and others, at one and the same time. Permit me to remind you of the moment when, seated under the weeping ash, your heart was filled with pity for the poor child that, from the time it enters into the world, is doubly helpless. Do you still remember how you refused to rob it of its mother? I appeal to the pure and genuine impulse of that moment. You were noble and forgiving then, because you had not yet suffered. You cast no stone at the fallen; you loved and, therefore, you forgave."
"Oh God!" cried the queen, "and what has happened to me? The woman on whose bosom my child rested is the most abandoned of creatures. I loved her, just as if she belonged to another world--a world of innocence. And now I am satisfied that she was the go-between, and that her naïveté was a mere mask concealing an unparalleled hypocrite. I imagined that truth and purity still dwelt in the simple rustic world--but everything is perverted and corrupt. The world of simplicity is base; aye, far worse than that of corruption!"