Chapter 22
It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that 'there is more joy
in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just
persons that need no repentance.' And certain ingenious philosophers of
our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of
correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has been
taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of another—that
has 'learned pity through suffering'—is likely to find very imperfect
satisfaction in the 'balance of happiness,' 'doctrine of compensations,'
and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough complacency in the
presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying will not be altogether
dark. The emotions, I have observed, are but slightly influenced by
arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her sweet lisping little
ones have all been taken from her one after another, and she is hanging
over her last dead babe, finds small consolation in the fact that the
tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a necessary average, and that a
thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing
well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother—if you
knew her pang and shared it—it is probable you would be equally unable
to see a ground of complacency in statistics.
Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly rational; but
emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for
individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of
human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off
against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side
of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling, and one must
be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that, and to have
emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in which it is evident
that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions
may be drawn from them—abstractions that may rise from heaps of ruined
lives like the sweet savour of a sacrifice in the nostrils of
philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it comes to pass that
for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old
saying about the joy of angels over the repentant sinner outweighing
their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning which does not jar
with the language of his own heart. It only tells him, that for angels
too there is a transcendent value in human pain, which refuses to be
settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too are turned away from
the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with yearning pity on the
poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no water is: that for
angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse
the bliss of ninety-nine.
Mr. Tryan had gone through the initiation of suffering: it is no wonder, then, that Janet's restoration was the work that lay nearest his heart; and that, weary as he was in body when he entered the vestry after the evening service, he was impatient to fulfil the promise of seeing her. His experience enabled him to divine—what was the fact—that the hopefulness of the morning would be followed by a return of depression and discouragement; and his sense of the inward and outward difficulties in the way of her restoration was so keen, that he could only find relief from the foreboding it excited by lifting up his heart in prayer. There are unseen elements which often frustrate our wisest calculations—which raise up the sufferer from the edge of the grave, contradicting the prophecies of the clear-sighted physician, and fulfilling the blind clinging hopes of affection; such unseen elements Mr. Tryan called the Divine Will, and filled up the margin of ignorance which surrounds all our knowledge with the feelings of trust and resignation. Perhaps the profoundest philosophy could hardly fill it up better.
His mind was occupied in this way as he was absently taking off his gown, when Mr. Landor startled him by entering the vestry and asking abruptly, 'Have you heard the news about Dempster?'