Falconer to have occasioned the publishing of his father's disgrace.
Such may recall to their minds that concealment is no law of the
universe; that, on the contrary, the Lord of the Universe said once:
'There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed.' Was the disgrace
of Andrew Falconer greater because a thousand men knew it, instead of
forty, who could not help knowing it? Hope lies in light and knowledge.
Andrew would be none the worse that honest men knew of his vice: they
would be the first to honour him if he should overcome it. If he would
not--the disgrace was just, and would fall upon his son only in sorrow,
not in dishonour. The grace of God--the making of humanity by his
beautiful hand--no, heart--is such, that disgrace clings to no man after
repentance, any more than the feet defiled with the mud of the world
come yet defiled from the bath. Even the things that proceed out of the
man, and do terribly defile him, can be cast off like the pollution of
the leper by a grace that goes deeper than they; and the man who
says, 'I have sinned: I will sin no more,' is even by the voice of his
brothers crowned as a conqueror, and by their hearts loved as one who
has suffered and overcome. Blessing on the God-born human heart! Let the
hounds of God, not of Satan, loose upon sin;--God only can rule the dogs
of the devil;--let them hunt it to the earth; let them drag forth the
demoniac to the feet of the Man who loved the people while he let the
devil take their swine; and do not talk about disgrace from a thing
being known when the disgrace is that the thing should exist.

One night I was returning home from some poor attempts of my own. I had
now been a pupil of Falconer for a considerable time, but having my own
livelihood to make, I could not do so much as I would.

It was late, nearly twelve o'clock, as I passed through the region of
Seven Dials. Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking men, and
now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her arms, in
the light of the gin-shops. The babies were the saddest to
see--nursery-plants already in training for the places these men and
women now held, then to fill a pauper's grave, or perhaps a perpetual
cell--say rather, for the awful spaces of silence, where the railway
director can no longer be guilty of a worse sin than house-breaking,
and his miserable brother will have no need of the shelter of which
he deprived him. Now and then a flaunting wo