fail thus in consequence of having rejected the common belief?
No; something far above the _common_ belief it must be, that would have
enabled him to act otherwise. But had he _known_ the Man of the gospel,
he could not have left her. He would have taken her to his sorrowful
bosom, wept with her, forgotten himself in pitiful grief over the spot
upon her whiteness; he would have washed her clean with love and
husband-power. He would have welcomed his shame as his hold of her
burden, whereby to lift it, with all its misery and loss, from her heart
forever. Had Faber done so as he was, he would have come close up to the
gate of the kingdom of Heaven, for he would have been like-minded with
Him who sought not His own. His honor, forsooth! Pride is a mighty
honor! His pride was great indeed, but it was not grand! Nothing
reflected, nothing whose object is self, has in it the poorest element
of grandeur. Our selves are ours that we may lay them on the altar of
love. Lying there, bound and bleeding and burning if need be, they are
grand indeed--for they are in their noble place, and rejoicing in their
fate. But this man was miserable, because, the possessor of a priceless
jewel, he had found it was not such as would pass for flawless in the
judgment of men--judges themselves unjust, whose very hearts were full
of bribes. He sat there an injured husband, a wronged, woman-cheated,
mocked man--he in whose eyes even a smutch on her face would have
lowered a woman--who would not have listened to an angel with a broken
wing-feather!

Let me not be supposed to make a little of Juliet's loss! What that
amounted to, let Juliet feel!--let any woman say, who loves a man, and
would be what that man thinks her! But I read, and think I understand,
the words of the perfect Purity: "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin
no more."

CHAPTER XXXV.

A HEART.

If people were both observant and memorious, they would cease, I fancy,
to be astonished at coincidences. Rightly regarded, the universe is but
one coincidence--only where will has to be developed, there is need for
human play, and room for that must be provided in its spaces. The works
of God being from the beginning, and all his beginnings invisible either
from greatness or smallness or nearness or remoteness, numberless
coincidences may pass in every man's history, before he becomes capable
of knowing either the need or the good of them, or even of noting them.

The same mo