`You judge him uncharitably, aunt, I know,' said I. `His very friends are not half so bad as you represent them. There is Walter Hargrave, Milicent's brother, for one: he is but a little lower than the angels, if half she says of him is true. She is continually talking to me about him, and lauding his many virtues to the skies.'
`You will form a very inadequate estimate of a man's character,' replied she, `if you judge by what a fond sister says of him. The worst of them generally know how to hide their misdeeds from their sister's eyes, and their mother's too.'
`And there is Lord Lowborough,' continued I, `quite a decent man.'
`Who told you so? Lord Lowborough is a desperate man. He has dissipated his fortune in gambling and other things, and is now seeking an heiress to retrieve it. I told Miss Wilmot so; but you're all alike: she haughtily answered she was very much obliged to me, but she believed she knew when a man was seeking her for her fortune, and when for herself; she flattered herself she had had experience enough in those matters to be justified in trusting to her own judgment--and as for his lordship's lack of fortune, she cared nothing about that, as she hoped her own would suffice for both; and as for his wildness, she supposed he was no worse than others--besides he was reformed now.--Yes, they can all play the hypocrite when they want to take in a fond, misguided woman!'
`Well, I think he's about as good as she is,' said I. But when Mr Huntingdon is married, he won't have many opportunities of con sorting with his bachelor friends;--and the worse they are, the more I long to deliver him from them.'
`To be sure, my dear; and the worse he is, I suppose, the more you long to deliver him from himself.'
`Yes, provided he is not incorrigible--that is, the more I long to deliver him from his faults--to give him an opportunity of shaking off the adventitious evil got from contact with others worse than himself, and shining out in the unclouded light of his own genuine goodness--to do my utmost to help his better self against his worse, and make him what he would have been if he had not, from the beginning, had a bad, selfish, miserly father, who, to gratify his own sordid passions, restricted him in the most innocent enjoyments of childhood and youth, and so disgusted him with every kind of restraint;--and a foolish mother who indulged him to the top of his bent, deceiving her husband for him, and doing her utmost to encourage those germs of folly and vice it was her duty to suppress,--and then, such a set of companions as you represent his friends to be--'
`Poor man!' said she, sarcastically, `his kind have greatly wronged him!'
`They have!' cried I--`and they shall wrong him no more--wife shall undo what his mother did!'
`Well!' said she, after a short pause. "I must say, Helen, I thought better of your judgment than this--and your taste too. How you can love such a man I cannot tell, or what pleasure you can find in his company: for "What fellowship hath light with darkness? or he that believeth with an infidel?"'
`He is not an infidel;--and I am not light, and he is not darkness, his worst and only vice is thoughtlessness.'
`And thoughtlessness,' pursued my aunt, may lead to every crime, and will but poorly excuse our errors in the sight of God. Mr Huntingdon, I suppose, is not without the common faculties of men: he is not so lightheaded as to be irresponsible: his Maker has endowed him with reason and conscience as well as the rest of us; the Scriptures are open to him as well as to others;--and "If he hear not them, neither will he hear though one rose from the dead." And, remember, Helen,' continued she, solemnly, `"The wicked shall be turned into hell, and they that forget God"!' And suppose, even, that he should continue to love you, and you him, and that you should pass through life together with tolerable comfort,--how will it be in the end, when you see yourselves parted for ever: you, perhaps, taken into eternal bliss, and he cast into the lake that burneth with unquenchable fire--there for ever to--'
`Not for ever,' I exclaimed, `"only till he has paid the uttermost farthing"; for "If any man's work abide not the fire, he shall suffer loss, yet himself shall be saved, but so as by fire," and He that "is able to subdue all things to Himself, will have all men to be saved," and "will in the fulness of time, gather together in one all things in Christ Jesus, who tasted death for every man, and in whom God will reconcile all things to Himself, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven,"'
`Oh, Helen! where did you learn all this?'
`In the Bible, aunt. I have searched it through, and found nearly thirty passages, all tending to support the same theory.'
`And is that the use you make of your Bible? And did you find no passages tending to prove the danger and the falsity of such a belief?'