answered were it to the point," Pendennis
replied; "but it is not; and it could be replied to you, that even to
the wretched outcry of the thief on the tree, the wisest and the best of
all teachers we know of, the untiring Comforter and Consoler, promised a
pitiful hearing and a certain hope. Hymns of saints! odes of poets! who
are we to measure the chances and opportunities, the means of doing, or
even judging, right and wrong, awarded to men; and to establish the rule
for meting out their punishments and rewards? We are as insolent and
unthinking in judging of men's morals as of their intellects. We admire
this man as being a great philosopher, and set down the other as a
dullard, not knowing either, or the amount of truth in either, or being
certain of the truth anywhere. We sing Te Deum for this hero who has
won a battle, and De Profundis for that other one who has broken out of
prison, and has been caught afterwards by the policeman. Our measure
of rewards and punishments is most partial and incomplete, absurdly
inadequate, utterly worldly, and we wish to continue it into the next
world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send
after them our impotent party verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We
set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in
comparison to that, Newton's mind or Pascal's or Shakspeare's was any
loftier than mine; as if the ray which travels from the sun would reach
me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that altitude,
the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and
pitifully base, that I say we should take no count of the calculation,
and it is a meanness to reckon the difference."

"Your figure fails there, Arthur," said the other, better pleased;
"if even by common arithmetic we can multiply as we can reduce almost
infinitely, the Great Reckoner must take count of all; and the small is
not small, or the great great, to his infinity."

"I don't call those calculations in question," Arthur said; "I only say
that yours are incomplete and premature; false in consequence, and, by
every operation, multiplying into wider error. I do not condemn the men
who murdered Socrates and damned Galileo. I say that they damned Galileo
and murdered Socrates."

"And yet but a moment since you admitted the propriety of acquiescence
in the present, and, I suppose, all other tyrannies?"

"No: but that if an opponent menaces me, of