In your own secret sins and terrors!”
Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief—rather hotly, for his esprit de corps was piqued—that when a soldier “gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby—for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)—it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not.”
In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a “double-first” candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: “And yet,” comes the charitable clause conditional, “I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?”
In Mr. Thackeray’s instance, exception has been taken, on ethical grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters. Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place (nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question—for some years a main support of the National Review—recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men’s real motives of action.[24]
PART-KNOWLEDGE.
1 Corinthians xiii. 9.
“We know in part,” said the apostle; who, therefore, prophesied in part; always with the assurance that when that which is perfect is come, then shall that which is in part be done away. Meanwhile, we see through a glass darkly, through a medium obscurely—“now I know in part.”