Again and again, in the New Testament, the publican (supposed at once traitor to his country and thief) and the harlot are made the companions of Christ. She out of whom He had cast seven devils, loves Him best, sees Him first, after His resurrection. The sting of that old verse, “When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst to him, and hast been partaker with adulterers,” seems done away with. Adultery itself uncondemned,—for, behold, in your hearts is not every one of you alike? “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” And so, and so, no more stones shall be cast nowadays; and here, on the top of our epitaph on the Bishop, lies a notice of the questionable sentence which hanged a man for beating his wife to death with a stick. “The jury recommended him strongly to mercy.”

They did so, because they knew not, in their own hearts, what mercy meant. They were afraid to do anything so extremely compromising and disagreeable as causing a man to be hanged,—had no ‘pity’ for any creatures beaten to death—wives, or beasts; but only a cowardly fear of commanding death, where it was due. Your modern conscience will not incur the responsibility of shortening the hourly more guilty life of a single rogue; but will contentedly fire a salvo of mitrailleuses into a [[128]]regiment of honest men—leaving Providence to guide the shot. But let us fasten on the word they abused, and understand it. Mercy—misericordia: it does not in the least mean forgiveness of sins,—it means pity of sorrows. In that very instance which the Evangelicals are so fond of quoting—the adultery of David—it is not the Passion for which he is to be judged, but the want of Passion,—the want of Pity. This he is to judge himself for, by his own mouth:—“As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die,—because he hath done this thing, and because he had no pity.”

And you will find, alike throughout the record of the Law and the promises of the Gospel, that there is, indeed, forgiveness with God, and Christ, for the passing sins of the hot heart, but none for the eternal and inherent sin of the cold. ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’;—find it you written anywhere that the unmerciful shall? ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.’ But have you record of any one’s sins being forgiven who loved not at all?

I opened my oldest Bible just now, to look for the accurate words of David about the killed lamb;—a small, closely, and very neatly printed volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by Sir D. Hunter Blair and J. Bruce, Printers to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in 1816. Yellow, now, with age, and flexible, but not unclean, with much use, except that the lower corners of [[129]]the pages at 8th of 1st Kings, and 32nd Deuteronomy are worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two chapters having cost me much pains. My mother’s list of the chapters with which, learned every syllable accurately, she established my soul in life, has just fallen out of it. And as probably the sagacious reader has already perceived that these letters are written in their irregular way, among other reasons, that they may contain, as the relation may become apposite, so much of autobiography as it seems to me desirable to write, I will take what indulgence the sagacious reader will give me, for printing the list thus accidentally occurrent:—

Exodus, chapters 15th and 20th.
2 Samuel chapters,, 1st, from 17th verse to the end.
1 Kings chapters,, 8th.
Psalms 23rd, 32nd, 90th, 91st, 103rd, 112th, 119th, 139th.
Proverbs chapters,, 2nd, 3rd, 8th, 12th.
Isaiah chapters,, 58th.
Matthew chapters,, 5th, 6th, 7th.
Acts chapters,, 26th.
1 Corinthians chapters,, 13th, 15th.
James chapters,, 4th.
Revelation chapters,, 5th, 6th.

And truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge,—in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after life,—and owe not a little to the [[130]]teaching of many people, this maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters, I count very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of all my education.

For the chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective to me in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain, acceptable through all fear or doubt: nor, through any fear or doubt or fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest, “Let not Mercy and Truth forsake Thee.”

And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of some enlarged observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of Law, I perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth,—infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their lips.

This assertion of the existence of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth, as the master first of the Law of Life, and then of the methods of knowledge and labour by which it is sustained, and which the ‘Saturday Review’ calls the effeminate sentimentality of Mr. Ruskin’s political economy, is accurately, you will observe, reversed by the assertion of the Predatory and Carnivorous—or, in plainer English, flesh-eating spirit in Man himself, as [[131]]the regulator of modern civilization, in the paper read by the Secretary at the Social Science meeting in Glasgow, 1860. Out of which the following fundamental passage may stand for sufficient and permanent example of the existent, practical, and unsentimental English mind, being the most vile sentence which I have ever seen in the literature of any country or time:—

“As no one will deny that Man possesses carnivorous teeth, or that all animals that possess them are more or less predatory, it is unnecessary to argue, à priori, that a predatory instinct naturally follows from such organization. It is our intention here to show how this inevitable result operates on civilized existence by its being one of the conditions of Man’s nature, and, consequently, of all arrangements of civilized society.”