When I ask myself what is the effect of this book, its net result, its ultimate teaching, I am confronted by a number of questions which I find it hard to answer with enthusiasm.
This is the story of a man who signs his name as bond for a friend, and then, when the friend becomes bankrupt, denies that he has done so and accuses the friend of forgery. In the end the innocent man is committed to prison and the guilty one is banqueted by his fellow townsmen.
So far the subject of the book cannot antagonise anybody. That the right may be worsted in the battle of life and the wrong may triumph is a fact of tremendous significance, capable of treatment as great, as helpful, and as stimulating as that of the Book of Job. It is against the moral drawn by the author from this fact of life that some of us may find reason to rebel.
If I read this wonderful book aright, it says as its final word that a life of deception does not always wither up and harden the human heart, but sometimes expands and softens it; that a man may pass from lie to lie until he is convinced that he is as white as an angel, and, having betrayed himself into a belief in his innocence, that he may become generous, unselfish, and noble.
On the other hand, this book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away by the suspicion and abuse of the world.
I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity. If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding power in the world not only is not God, but the devil.