Do not let it be supposed that we are advocates or even apologists in this case: our only anxiety is that, in the sacrifice of one, impunity may not be gained by, perhaps, greater offenders. Let not the man who flung her beauty and her virtue into ruin be allowed to escape. Her sins were of man’s making: if these are to be remembered, let his share in them form part of the example we are taught to avoid. By man she was ruined in body and perilled in soul. Throughout the course of her life she does not appear to have met with one who acted by her in a spirit of Christian charity and anxiety: she was born with qualities that should have led her heavenward: she was early pushed from the path thither tending; nor amid all her royal, her noble, and alas! her clerical companions, was there one who persuaded her that she was erring—nay, but the contrary. The whole correspondence, now for the first time divulged in these volumes, shows the wickedness of men who could seduce to sin—their guilt in maintaining such terms with her who had fallen as to make her feel assured that she had neither incurred sin nor merited disgrace—and their baseness in making her in her helplessness feel with double weight the penalty of a crime which they had in the days of her greatness held to be none. Let us, indeed, learn wisdom from a tale, the heroine of which does not afford the sole example that is to be avoided; but be it also ours to remember her services rather than her sins. The latter, with those of the first seducer who made of her very charity a means to destroy her for ever, may be left to Him who will render an unerring sentence when seducer and victim are in presence together at the tribunal of truth. At all events, let not the hardest blows of humanity fall on the weakest offender. She would have been better but for man—that she was not much worse was for no lack of energy on his part to make her so.
Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us:
He knows each chord, its various tone—
Each spring, its various bias.
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it.
What’s done we partly can compute,
But know not what’s resisted.