Friends and Neighbors | Page 3

_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._
There is Good in All. Let us show our faith in it. When the lazy whine

of the mendicant jars on your ears, think of his unaided, unschooled
childhood; think that his lean cheeks never knew the baby-roundness of
content that ours have worn; that his eye knew no youth of fire--no
manhood of expectancy. Pity, help, teach him. When you see the trader,
without any pride of vocation, seeking how he can best cheat you, and
degrade himself, glance into the room behind his shop and see there his
pale wife and his thin children, and think how cheerfully he meets that
circle in the only hour he has out of the twenty-four. Pity his
narrowness of mind; his want of reliance upon the God of Good; but
remember there have been Greshams, and Heriots, and Whittingtons;
and remember, too, that in our happy land there are thousands of
almshouses, built by the men of trade alone. And when you are
discontented with the great, and murmur, repiningly, of Marvel in his
garret, or Milton in his hiding-place, turn in justice to the Good among
the great. Read how John of Lancaster loved Chaucer and sheltered
Wicliff. There have been Burkes as well as Walpoles. Russell
remembered Banim's widow, and Peel forgot not Haydn.
Once more: believe that in every class there is Good; in every man,
Good. That in the highest and most tempted, as well as in the lowest,
there is often a higher nobility than of rank. Pericles and Alexander had
great, but different virtues, and although the refinement of the one may
have resulted in effeminacy, and the hardihood of the other in brutality,
we ought to pause ere we condemn where we should all have fallen.
Look only for the Good. It will make you welcome everywhere, and
everywhere it will make you an instrument to good. The lantern of
Diogenes is a poor guide when compared with the Light God hath set
in the heavens; a Light which shines into the solitary cottage and the
squalid alley, where the children of many vices are hourly exchanging
deeds of kindness; a Light shining into the rooms of dingy
warehousemen and thrifty clerks, whose hard labour and hoarded coins
are for wife and child and friend; shining into prison and workhouse,
where sin and sorrow glimmer with sad eyes through rusty bars into
distant homes and mourning hearths; shining through heavy curtains,
and round sumptuous tables, where the heart throbs audibly through
velvet mantle and silken vest, and where eye meets eye with affection
and sympathy; shining everywhere upon God's creatures, and with its
broad beams lighting up a virtue wherever it