“I can’t see why it should. I can’t feel that I have wronged God. I have been trying to feel it, Mr. Wingfold, ever since you talked to me. But I don’t know God, and I only feel what I have done to Emmeline. If I said to God, ‘Pardon me,’ and he said to me, ‘I do pardon you,’ I should feel just the same. What could that do to set anything right that I have set wrong? I am what I am, and what I ever shall be, and the injury which came from me, cleaves fast to her, and is my wrong wherever she is.” He hid his face in his hands. “What use CAN it be to torture the poor boy so?” said Helen to herself. The two men sat silent. Then Polwarth said: “I doubt if there is any use in trying to feel. And no amount of trying could enable you to imagine what God’s forgiveness is like to those that have it in them. Tell me something more you do feel, Mr. Lingard.” “I feel that I could kill myself to bring her back to life.” “That is, you would gladly make amends for the wrong you have done her.” “I would give my life, my soul, to do it.” “And there is nothing you can do for it?” Helen began to tremble. “What is there that can be done?” answered Leopold. “It does seem hard that a man should be made capable of doing things that he is not made capable of undoing again.” “It is indeed a terrible thought! And even the smallest wrong is, perhaps, too awful a thing for created being ever to set right again.” “You mean it takes God to do that?” “I do.” “I don’t see how he ever could set some things right.” “He would not be God if he could not or would not do for his creature what that creature cannot do for himself, and must have done for him or lose his life.” “Then he isn’t God, for he can’t help me.” “Because you don’t see what can be done, you say God can do nothing--which is as much as to say there cannot be more within his scope than there is within yours! One thing is clear, that, if he saw no more than what lies within your ken, he could not be God. The very impossibility you see in the thing points to the region wherein God works.” “I don’t quite understand you. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all a horrible mess. I wish I was dead.” “My dear sir, is it reasonable that because a being so capable of going wrong finds himself incapable of setting right, he should judge it useless to cry to that being who called him into being to come to his aid?--and that in the face of the story--if it were but an old legend, worn and disfigured--that he took upon himself our sins?” Leopold hung his head. “God needs no making up to him,” the gate-keeper went on--“so far from it that he takes our sins on himself, that he may clear them out of the universe. How could he say he took our sins upon him, if he could not make amends for them to those they had hurt?” “Ah!” cried Leopold, with a profound sigh, “--if that could be!--if he could really do that!”