And how glorious in practice, this faith!  How easy, henceforth, all the labours of our law-makers, and how delightful, how practical the theories of our philanthropists!  To educate the Good—­the good in All:  to raise every man in his own opinion, and yet to stifle all arrogance, by showing that all possess this Good. In themselves, but not of themselves.  Had we but faith in this truth, how soon should we all be digging through the darkness, for this Gold of Love—­this universal Good.  A Howard, and a Fry, cleansed and humanized our prisons, to find this Good; and in the chambers of all our hearts it is to be found, by labouring eyes and loving hands.

Why all our harsh enactments?  Is it from experience of the strength of vice in ourselves that we cage, chain, torture, and hang men?  Are none of us indebted to friendly hands, careful advisers; to the generous, trusting guidance, solace, of some gentler being, who has loved us, despite the evil that is in us—­for our little Good, and has nurtured that Good with smiles and tears and prayers?  O, we know not how like we are to those whom we despise!  We know not how many memories of kith and kin the murderer carries to the gallows—­how much honesty of heart the felon drags with him to the hulks.

There is Good in All.  Dodd, the forger, was a better man than most of us:  Eugene Aram, the homicide, would turn his foot from a worm.  Do not mistake us.  Society demands, requires that these madmen should be rendered harmless.  There is no nature dead to all Good.  Lady Macbeth would have slain the old king, Had he not resembled her father as he slept.

It is a frequent thought, but a careless and worthless one, because never acted on, that the same energies, the same will to great vices, had given force to great virtues.  Do we provide the opportunity?  Do we believe in Good?  If we are ourselves deceived in any one, is not all, thenceforth, deceit? if treated with contempt, is not the whole world clouded with scorn? if visited with meanness, are not all selfish?  And if from one of our frailer fellow-creatures we receive the blow, we cease to believe in women.  Not the breast at which we have drank life—­not the sisterly hands that have guided ours—­not the one voice that has so often soothed us in our darker hours, will save the sex:  All are massed in one common sentence:  all bad.  There may be Delilahs:  there are many Ruths.  We should not lightly give them up.  Napoleon lost France when he lost Josephine.  The one light in Rembrandt’s gloomy life was his sister.

And all are to be approached at some point.  The proudest bends to some feeling—­Coriolanus conquered Rome:  but the husband conquered the hero.  The money-maker has influences beyond his gold—­Reynolds made an exhibition of his carriage, but he was generous to Northcote, and had time to think of the poor Plympton schoolmistress.  The cold are not all ice.  Elizabeth slew Essex—­the queen triumphed; the woman died.