There is One who will appreciate with entire accuracy the amount of guilt that is in each wrong deed of each wrong-doer, and mercifully allow for such as never had a chance of being anything but wrong-doers.  And it will not matter whether it was from original constitution or from unhappy training that these poor creatures never had that chance.  I was lately quite astonished to learn that some sincere, but stupid American divines have fallen foul of the eloquent author of “Elsie Venner,” and accused him of fearful heresy, because he declared his confident belief that “God would never make a man with a crooked spine and then punish him for not standing upright.”  Why, that statement of the “Autocrat” appears to me at least as certain as that two and two make four.  It may, indeed, contain some recondite and malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord’s Prayer.  But, understanding it simply as meaning that the Judge of all the Earth will do right, it appears to me an axiom beyond all question.  And I take it as putting in a compact form the spirit of what I have been arguing for,—­to wit, that, though human law must of necessity hold all rational beings as alike responsible, yet in the eye of God the difference may be immense.  The graceful vase, that stands in the drawing-room under a glass shade, and never goes to the well, has no great right to despise the rough pitcher that goes often and is broken at last.  It is fearful to think what malleable material we are in the hands of circumstances.

And a certain Authority, considerably wiser and incomparably more charitable than the American divines already mentioned, recognized the fact, when He taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation!” We shall think, in a little while, of certain influences which may make or mar the human being; but it may be said here that I firmly believe that happiness is one of the best of disciplines.  As a general rule, if people were happier, they would be better.  When you see a poor cabman on a winter-day, soaked with rain, and fevered with gin, violently thrashing the wretched horse he is driving, and perhaps howling at it, you may be sure that it is just because the poor cabman is so miserable that he is doing all that.  It was a sudden glimpse, perhaps, of his bare home and hungry children, and of the dreary future which lay before himself and them, that was the true cause of those two or three furious lashes you saw him deal upon the unhappy screw’s ribs.  Whenever I read any article in a review, which is manifestly malignant, and intended not to improve an author, but to give him pain, I cannot help immediately wondering what may have been the matter with the man who wrote the malignant article.  Something must have been making him very unhappy, I think.  I do not allude