The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne BrontĂ« (librera reader .txt) đ
- Author: Anne Brontë
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âWell, I think heâs about as good as she is,â said I. âBut when Mr. Huntingdon is married, he wonât have many opportunities of consorting with his bachelor friends;â âand the worse they are, the more I long to deliver him from them.â
âTo be sure, my dear; and the worse he is, I suppose, the more you long to deliver him from himself.â
âYes, provided he is not incorrigibleâ âthat is, the more I long to deliver him from his faultsâ âto 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 goodnessâ âto 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;â âand 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 suppressâ âand then, such a set of companions as you represent his friends to beâ ââ
âPoor man!â said she, sarcastically, âhis kind have greatly wronged him!â
âThey have!â cried Iâ ââand they shall wrong him no moreâ âhis wife shall undo what his mother did!â
âWell,â said she, after a short pause, âI must say, Helen, I thought better of your judgment than thisâ âand your taste too. How you can love such a man I cannot tell, or what pleasure you can find in his company; for âwhat fellowship hath light with darkness; or he that believeth with an infidel?âââ
âHe is not an infidel;â âand I am not light, and he is not darkness; his worst and only vice is thoughtlessness.â
âAnd thoughtlessness,â pursued my aunt, âmay 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;â âand âif he hear not them, neither will he hear though one rose from the dead.â And remember, Helen,â continued she, solemnly, âââthe wicked shall be turned into hell, and they that forget God!â And suppose, even, that he should continue to love you, and you him, and that you should pass through life together with tolerable comfortâ âhow will it be in the end, when you see yourselves parted forever; you, perhaps, taken into eternal bliss, and he cast into the lake that burneth with unquenchable fireâ âthere forever toâ ââ
âNot forever,â I exclaimed, âââonly till he has paid the uttermost farthing;â for âif any manâs work abide not the fire, he shall suffer loss, yet himself shall be saved, but so as by fire;â and He that âis able to subdue all things to Himself will have all men to be saved,â and âwill, in the fullness 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.âââ
âOh, Helen! where did you learn all this?â
âIn the Bible, aunt. I have searched it through, and found nearly thirty passages, all tending to support the same theory.â
âAnd 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?â
âNo: I found, indeed, some passages that, taken by themselves, might seem to contradict that opinion; but they will all bear a different construction to that which is commonly given, and in most the only difficulty is in the word which we translate âeverlastingâ or âeternal.â I donât know the Greek, but I believe it strictly means for ages, and might signify either endless or long-enduring. And as for the danger of the belief, I would not publish it abroad if I thought any poor wretch would be likely to presume upon it to his own destruction, but it is a glorious thought to cherish in oneâs own heart, and I would not part with it for all the world can give!â
Here our conference ended, for it was now high time to prepare for church. Everyone attended the morning service, except my uncle, who hardly ever goes, and Mr. Wilmot, who stayed at home with him to enjoy a quiet game of cribbage. In the afternoon Miss Wilmot and Lord Lowborough likewise excused themselves from attending; but Mr. Huntingdon vouchsafed to accompany us again. Whether it was to ingratiate himself with my aunt I cannot tell, but, if so, he certainly should have behaved better. I must confess, I did not like his conduct during service at all. Holding his prayerbook upside down, or open at any place but the right, he did nothing but stare about him, unless he happened to catch my auntâs eye or mine, and then he would drop his own on his book, with a puritanical air of mock solemnity that would have been ludicrous, if it had not been too provoking. Once, during the sermon, after attentively regarding Mr. Leighton for a few minutes, he suddenly produced his gold pencil-case and snatched up a Bible.
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