Next we turn to Anne Brontë’s “Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” The “tenant” was Helen, wife of Arthur Huntingdon, a selfish and irresponsible man, whom she left for a season when life became intolerable for her. Later on in the book, having returned home, she talks with her aunt about the position of their marriage.
“I must say, Helen, I thought better of your judgment than this – and your taste too. How you can love such a man I cannot tell, or what pleasure you can find in his company: for ‘What fellowship hath light with darkness? or he that believeth with an infidel?’
“He is not an infidel;- and I am not light, and he is not darkness, his worst and only vice is thoughtlessness.”
“And thoughtlessness,” pursued my aunt, “may lead to every crime, and will but poorly excuse our errors in the sight of God. Mr Huntingdon, I suppose, is not without the common faculties of men: he is not so light-headed as to be irresponsible: his Maker has endowed him with reason and conscience as well as the rest of us; the Scriptures are open to him as well as to others;- and ‘if he hear not them, neither will he hear though one rose from the dead.’ And remember, Helen,” continued she, solemnly, “‘The wicked shall be turned into hell, and they that forget God.’ And suppose, even, that he should continue to love you, and you him, and that you should pass through life together with tolerable comfort,- how will it be in the end, when you see yourselves parted for ever; you, perhaps, taken to eternal bliss, and he cast into the lake that burneth with unquenchable fire – there for ever to -”
“Not for ever,” I exclaimed, “‘only till he has paid the uttermost farthing’, for ‘If any man’s work abide not the fire, he shall suffer loss, yet himself shall be saved, but so as by fire’ and He that ‘is able to subdue all things to Himself, will have all men to be saved,’ and ‘will in the fullness of time, gather together in one all things in Christ Jesus, who tasted death for every man, and in whom God will reconcile all things to Himself, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.'”
“Oh, Helen, where did you learn all of this?”
“In the Bible, aunt. I have searched it through, and found nearly thirty passages, all tending to support the same theory.”
“And is that the use you make of your Bible? And did you find no passages tending to prove the danger and the falsity of such a belief?”
“No: I found, indeed, some passages that, taken by themselves, might seem to contradict that opinion; but they will all bear a different construction to that which is commonly given, and in most the only difficulty is in the word which we translate ‘everlasting’ or ‘eternal’: I don’t know the Greek, but I believe it strictly means ‘for ages’ and might signify either ‘endless’ or ‘long-enduring’. And as for the danger of the belief, I would not publish it abroad, if I thought any poor wretch would be likely to presume upon it to his own destruction, but it is a glorious thought to cherish in one’s own heart, and I would not part with it for all the world can give!”
The 1996 BBC production of Wildfell Hall, with Toby Stephens, Tara Fitzgerald, and Rupert Graves, has omitted the above conversation piece, as might be expected
