Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/153

 our inmost hearts! What a moral revolution would such a discovery produce! how weak we should find ourselves under such a trial! how soon we should begin to disconnect the offender and the offence! then for the first time we should begin to understand the full force of temptation, and to allow for its fearful strength; and should we not begin to excuse what had never before seemed capable of palliation? Jeannie Deans's refusal to save her sister—so young, so beloved, so helpless,—at the expense of perjury, has always seemed to me the noblest effort in which principle was ever sustained by religion. How well I remember (at such a distance from England I may perhaps be pardoned for clinging to every recollection of the past) a discussion between some friends and myself, as to whether Jeannie Deans should have saved her sister's life—even with a lie, I am afraid, I rather argued—and for a great right do a little wrong—that, to save one whom I loved, I must have committed the sin of perjury, and said, 'On my soul be the guilt:' that, if even to refuse a slight favour was painful, who could bear to say 'No!' when on that 'no!' hung a fellow-creature's life—that fellow creature most tenderly beloved! But I was in error that worst error, which cloaks itself in a good intention, and would fain appear only an amiable weakness".

How truthfully and impressively, too, does L. E. L. account for the moral sublime of Jeannie Deans's conduct! "She could not have laid the sin of perjury upon her soul: she had been brought up with the fear of God before her eyes: she could not—dared not—take His name in vain. Many a still and solemn Sabbath, by the lingering light of the sunset sky, or with the shadow of the lamp falling around