Anne Bronte: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

20. CHAPTER XX (continued)

'Poor man!' said she, sarcastically, 'his kind have greatly wronged him!'

'They have!' cried I - 'and they shall wrong him no more - his wife shall undo what his mother did!'

'Well,' said she, after a short pause, 'I must say, Helen, I thought better of your judgment than this - and your taste too. How you can love such a man I cannot tell, or what pleasure you can find in his company; for "what fellowship hath light with darkness; or he that believeth with an infidel?"'

'He is not an infidel; - and I am not light, and he is not darkness; his worst and only vice is thoughtlessness.'

'And thoughtlessness,' pursued my aunt, 'may 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 light-headed 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; - and "if he hear not them, neither will he hear though one rose from the dead." And remember, Helen,' continued she, solemnly, '"the wicked shall be turned into hell, and they that forget God!"' And suppose, even, that he should continue to love you, and you him, and that you should pass through life together with tolerable comfort - how will it be in the end, when you see yourselves parted for ever; you, perhaps, taken into eternal bliss, and he cast into the lake that burneth with unquenchable fire - there for ever to - '

'Not for ever,' I exclaimed, '"only till he has paid the uttermost farthing;" for "if any man's work abide not the fire, he shall suffer loss, yet himself shall be saved, but so as by fire;" and He that "is able to subdue all things to Himself will have all men to be saved," and "will, in the fulness 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."'