A dead man's diary

by Coulson Kernahan

"Yes," I said, "I do indeed feel that whatever help comes to me must be something outside myself, and that no sorrowing of mine can atone for the past; but I feel also that I, and I only, am responsible for what I have done, and that to lay that responsibility upon another is utterly inadequate to satisfy even my limited sense of justice—besides which I never can and never will believe in the possibility of the innocent being allowed to suffer for the guilty."

"But the innocent do suffer for the guilty," she said, "even in the very earth-world, by the laws of which you wish to judge the heavenly one. You profess yourself willing to abide by the evidence of your senses, and if you will only look back upon the earth-life which you have left, you will see that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and that the innocent are suffering for the guilty every day, and that God, for some good reason of His own, allows it to be so. As for what you say about your sense of justice, I agree with you that if a man run into your debt—run into your debt by wilful and wicked courses—he must be held answerable for the repayment of the money. But supposing one comes forward who loves him, and who has watched his sinnings with sorrow, and says, 'I will pay for my friend that which he cannot pay for himself,' would not your sense of justice be satisfied?"

"Even then the moral obligation remains," I objected.

"Yes, but that obligation has been transferred," she said, "although as a matter of fact, it is against God rather than against man, that our blackest sins are committed. But, independently of that side of the question, Christ has taken the consequences of your sin, and of the wrong you did Dorothy—the consequences to her, as well as to yourself—upon Himself, and has suffered for you and for her in His own person, and if He be willing to forgive, then are you forgiven indeed!

"That reconciliation by the Saviour should at any time have been to me an intellectual stumbling-block is now beyond my comprehension," she continued earnestly. "In its very adaptability to our human needs, Christianity bears the stamp of its divine origin. Left to himself, the very best of us must feel his inability either to atone for the evil he has already done, or to withstand the temptations which yet await him in the future, and though he struggle right manfully to clamber out of the gulf into which he has fallen, the dead-weight of his sins, which he carries and must carry chained log-like about him, is ever the heaviest clog to drag him back. But Christianity does more for a man than merely forgive him his debts. It sets the bankrupt upon his legs again, a solvent man and sane, with a clean bill of health, and with a fresh start in life. It is the religion of Hope, for none is too sinful for the Saviour to save, and to the man who brings his sins, as well as his inability to resist his sins, to the feet of Christ, there is indeed a present Help and Hope in all his troubles! There is much—very much—in Christianity that I cannot and do not pretend to understand, but I can understand enough to make me very loving and very trustful. The only mystery which still sometimes troubles me is that most terrible of all mysteries—the mystery of human suffering. But even that I am content to leave, for is not our God Himself a suffering God? and who that witnessed the sufferings of Jesus Christ (and what sufferings were ever like to His?) could have foreseen that the cruel Cross whereon He hung should hereafter be the finger-post to point the way to heaven? or that beneath His cry of agony in the garden, God heard the triumph-song of a ransomed world?"

CHAPTER XIV.

HOPE.

At last there came a time, even in hell, when the burden of my sin lay so heavily upon me, that I felt I could bear it no longer, and that if succour there came none, the very soul of me must wither away and die. It was not that I wanted to evade the punishment of my crime, for I was willing and wished to undergo it to the uttermost. No, that which was so terrible to me was the thought that not all the sufferings of eternity could avail to wipe away the awful stain upon my spirit, or to undo the evil which I had brought upon the woman I had ruined. Of myself and of my future, save for the continual crying-out of my soul after its lost purity, I scarcely cared now to think. It was of Dorothy that my heart was full; it was for Dorothy that I never ceased to sorrow, to lament, and—sinner, though I was—to pray. I saw then the inevitable consequences of the wrong I had done her pictured forth in all their horror. I saw her, with the sense of her sin as yet but fresh upon her, shrinking from every glance, and fancying that she read the knowledge of her guilt in every eye. I saw her, "not knowing where to turn for refuge from swiftly-advancing shame, and understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther and farther in the nightfall," stealing stealthily forth at dusk to hide herself from her fellow-creatures.