It refers itself to others.  It absolutely requires human sympathy.  So long as the man lives to some extent in the opinion and affections of his brother men,—­so long as he is even uncomfortable under the sense of being shut out from these otherwise than as the being so shall affect his own interests,—­we may be quite sure he is not wholly lost.  The difference between the two men is still more clearly shown when they are brought face to face with the result of their wrong-doing.  With each there is sorrow, but in Wybrow, and still more vividly as we shall see in Tito Melema, it is the sorrow of self-worship only.  No thought of the wronged one otherwise than as an obstacle and embarrassment, no thought of the wrong simply as a wrong, can touch him.  This sorrow is merely remorse, “the sorrow of the world which worketh death.”  Arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its ascendancy.  There is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say about him.  All thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to her.  The wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong.  This is repentance; and with repentance restoration becomes possible and begins.

Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne.  Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him.  Hard almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong; savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that wrong accomplished;—­these may well seem things irreconcilable with any true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love.  Yet, examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with the larger fulness of that life.  They are born of the same spirit which said of old, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep “law of resentment” which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the Christian code.  The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life.  It subsists in and springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the realities of existence.  Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam, because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.