"But you know, sir," Levison answered--"you know who has been behind it
all. Take me swiftly, and do what has to be done. I beg and implore you
to delay no longer. I can make no defence, nor shall I try to do so. Who
you are, and what power is given to you, I don't know, nor can I
understand. But this one thing I know--that I am guilty, and am prepared
to pay the penalty for what I have done. I will go with you from this
sin-stricken house!"
"Yes," Joseph answered, "my brother, you will go with me, but not as you
think, to the hands of human law. It is not God's will that you should
suffer for what you have done at the hands of human justice. His will
towards you is very different, and I am come to be the humble instrument
of it. You will come with me, as you say; but you will come with me to
my own house, there to make your repentance before Almighty God, meekly
kneeling upon your knees, and asking for forgiveness for your great sin
and for grace to live a new life in the future, henceforth serving Him
and bearing the weight of the Cross which He bore for you so long ago,
until at last, in His good will and time, you may be gathered up and
join the blessed company of those saved by Christ's precious blood."
The deep, grave words roused the long dormant religious instinct in the
heart of the worldly financier who stood broken and abject before him.
The Jew remembered the days of his youth, when he also had prayed to the
Lord of Hosts and the God of Israel in the synagogue of his parents. In
one swift burst of remembrance the times came back to him when he had
bound the phylacteries upon his forehead, and heard the priests of
Israel reading from the Holy Book of the Law. He saw in a sudden riot of
memory the solemn hours of Passover, tasted the forgotten savor of days
of fasting, performed the holy ablutions of his faith. And now he heard
from the lips of the man whom he had tried to murder, news of that other
religion which he had scorned and derided all his life, and yet which
was but the fulfilment of the prophecies of his own. One had come to him
preaching the Messiah Whom he had spurned--the Jew Who was both God and
Man, and Whose Agony had saved the world.
Levison bowed his head in his hands and wept.
"And you," he said, between his sobs, "if indeed God can forgive me for
the evil that I have done, how can you forgive me? I have never spoken
to you, yet I hated you because you had come into my theatre and
disturbed my life and taken the profits of my business away from me. But
you have not done to me a tithe of the evil I would have done to you.
You came to me, knowing well my evil life and that I pandered to the
passions of the low and the debased. You did what I now see the Lord
commanded you to do. But I----How can you forgive me, Master?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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