f
love. Were my life weighed with theirs might it not appear that theirs
was the richer in essential fortitude, in patience and endurance, in
all the final qualities that compose the finest manhood?

The spirit of compassion interprets these lives to me; it lends me
vision. It enables me to see them not in their artificial disparities,
but in their deep-lying kinship with mine and all other lives. And the
same thing happens when I survey lives stained with folly, wrecked by
weakness, or made detestable by sin and crime. I also have known
folly, weakness, sin; but for me there were compulsions to a virtuous
life which these never knew. Why am I not as these? Perhaps because
my nature rests on a securer equipoise, or because there is in it a
certain power of moral recuperation which these have lacked, or because
I have the prudence that stops short of consummated folly, or because
my environment imposes and creates restraint, or because I have never
known the peculiar violence of temptation before which they succumbed.
There may be a hundred reasons, but scarce one which gives me cause for
boasting. With their life to live, had I done better? Exposed to
their temptations, deprived of all the helpful friendships that have
interposed between my life and ruin, should I have done as well? In
those wakeful hours of night when all my past life runs before me like
a frieze of flame, how clearly do I see how frequently I grazed the
snare, hung over gulfs of wild disaster, courted ruin, and escaped I
know not how? Remembering this, can I be hard towards those who fell?
Can I pride myself on an escape in which my will had little part, a
deliverance which was a kind of miracle, wrought not by virtue or
discretion, but by some outside force which thrust out a strong and
willing hand to save me? And, as these thoughts pursue me, I find
myself all at once regarding these wrecked and miserable lives not from
the outside but the inside. I penetrate their inmost coil of being,
and see with horror the crumbling of the house of life--with horror,
but also with a torturing pity. And then because compassion lives in
me, I can at last separate between the sinner and his sin. The sin
remains abhorrent, but I cannot hate the sinner. I see him as one who
has fallen in a bad cause, but his wounds cry so loud for pity that I
forget the moral treason that has brought him to a battle-field so
ignominious and so disastrous. And out of