Mr. Somerset called in reply to Lucy’s invitation. He told her that in accepting it, he was accepting a real kindness. Without it, this Christmas might have been very lonely and desolate for him. His old landlord lay at the point of death, and consequently the whole household was saddened and absorbed.
“How much sadness there is in the world!” sighed Lucy. “And how terrible it is that there is a sort of consolation in realising that one is not the only burdened and anxious soul. It seems a selfish and cruel feeling to find comfort in that thought!”
“Yes, it seems so,” he said. “I used to think so, and probably it is so in the spirit in which the idea may sometimes be suggested and received. Yet I have learned to understand that it does not have a selfish and cruel origin. I think I have discovered what the idea springs from, and how it is that such a thought may really soothe and strengthen. After all, what is the very depth of woe—its unendurable sting?”
“I think it is the failure of our faith,” she said gently. “The chilly feeling that God has let go of us and that there are none to help.”
“Exactly so,” answered Mr. Somerset, “and I daresay all of us have known that feeling more than once. It calls our very humility and littleness to its aid, so that we ask, ‘Who am I that God should remember me?’ But can any sane mind look upon another, the lowest, the worst and the most abject, and deliberately say, ‘Who is he that God should remember him?’ I think not. We can feel that would be the vilest blasphemy against God. It would at once strip God of all that makes Him good, ay, or great either, with that wonderful greatness, before which earth’s highest and lowest and best and worst are all the same. No, Mrs. Challoner, in realising the fellowship of others in suffering, we at once realise that God must know all about it, and that there must be some wise purpose in it, and if so for that other, then for ourselves too.”
“Did not some philosopher say that death, being universal, could be no evil?” asked Lucy.
“I think it was the poet Schiller said so,” returned Mr. Somerset, “and I believe it is the consciousness of this, however little realised, which keeps life brave and bright and sane in the perpetual presence of death. The ‘solidarity of humanity,’ though the phrase is one which they may scarcely understand, is the secret treasure of the humble. It never occurs to them to be surprised and shocked when those evils befall them which they always knew befell others. In their eyes ‘it is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth to Him _good_,’ always ‘good,’ you may observe. ‘It is all in the day’s work,’ they tell one, when their lot is hardest.”