Perhaps there is never a time when man or woman has a better chance, with suitable help, of building a good character than just after a humiliating fall which has taught the sinner his own weakness, and given him a sad experience of the bitterness of sin.
Nobody wants to be sold under sin, and go the whole length in iniquity; and when one has gone just far enough in wrong living to perceive in advance all its pains and penalties, there is often an agonized effort to get back to respectability, like the clutching of the drowning man for the shore. The waters of death are cold and bitter, and nobody wants to be drowned.
But it is just at this point that the drowning hand is wrenched off; society fears that the poor wet wretch will upset its respectable boat; it pushes him off, and rows over the last rising bubbles.
And this is not in the main because men and women are hard-hearted or cruel, but because they are busy, every one of them, with their own works and ways, hurried, driven, with no time, strength, or heart-leisure for more than they are doing. What is one poor soul struggling in the water, swimming up stream, to the great pushing, busy, bustling world?
Nothing in the review of life appears to us so pitiful as the absolute nothingness of the individual in the great mass of human existence. To each living, breathing, suffering atom, the consciousness of what it desires and suffers is so intense, and to every one else so faint. It is faint even to the nearest and dearest, compared to what it is to one's self. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith."
Suppose you were suddenly struck down to-day by death in any of its dreadful forms, how much were this to you, how little to the world! how little even to the friendly world, who think well of you and wish you kindly! The paper that tells the tale scarcely drops from their hand; a few shocked moments of pity or lamentation, perhaps, and then returns the discussion of what shall be for dinner, and whether the next dress shall be cut with flounces or folds: the gay waves of life dance and glitter over the last bubble which marks where you sank.
So we have seen poor Maggie, with despair and bitterness in her heart, wandering, on a miserable cold day, through the Christmas rejoicings of New York, on the very verge of going back to courses that end in unutterable degradation and misery; and yet, how little it was anybody's business to seek or to save her.