Not often does a man pass his whole life before him and deliberately criticize himself, his actions and his way.

If he does, it is seldom when he would appear to an outsider to have most reasonable occasion; rather during some pause when body and mind both are still.

The soul does not always recognise itself as a guest seated within this frame; sometimes it appears to escape and look at the human life it has led, as if from without.  It seems to become absorbed into the august stream of being; to see that fragment itself, without self-love, and as the great all of mankind would regard it if laid open to them.

It perceives the inevitable verdict.  Thus and thus have I done.  They will judge me rightly, that thus and thus I am.

If a man is reasonable and sees things as they were, he does not often fix on some particular act for which to blame himself when he deplores the past, for at times of clear vision, the soul escapes from the bondage of incident.  It gets away from the region of particulars, and knows itself by nature even better than by deed.  There is a common thought that beggars sympathy in almost every shallow mind.  It seldom finds deliberate expression.  Perhaps it may be stated thus:—­

The greatness of the good derived from it, makes the greatness of the fault.

A man tells a great lie, and saves his character by it.  No wonder it weighs on his conscience ever after.  And yet perhaps he has told countless lies, both before and since, told them out of mere carelessness, or from petty spite or for small advantages, and utterly forgotten them.  Now which of these, looked at by the judge, is the great offender?  Is the one lie he repents of the most wicked, or are those that with small temptation he flung about daily, and so made that one notable lie easy?

Was it strange that Valentine, looking back, should not with any special keenness of pain have rued his mistake in taking Melcombe?

No.  That was a part of himself.  It arose naturally out of his character, which, but for that one action, he felt he never might have fully known.

So weak, so longing for pleasure and ease, so faintly conscious of any noble desire for good, so wrapped up in a sense as of the remoteness of God, how could it be otherwise?

If a man is a Christian, he derives often in such thoughts a healing consciousness of the Fatherhood and Humanity of God.  He perceives that he was most to be pitied and least to be judged, not while he stood, but when he fell.  There is no intention of including here hardened crimes of dishonesty, and cruelty, and violence, only those pathetic descents which the ingrain faults and original frailty of our nature make so easy, and which life and the world are so arranged as to punish even after a loving God forgives.

“Those faults,” he may say, “they seem to live, though I shall die.  They are mine, though I lose all else beside.  Where can I lay them down, where lose them?  Is there any healing to be found other than in His sympathy, His forgiveness who made our nature one with His to raise it to Himself?”