Chapter 8 - Forgiveness and revenge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
When the struggle was over – and a marble calm began to succeed the last dread agony – I felt as I had never felt before that there was peace and forgiveness for him in Heaven. All his errors – to speak plainly – all his vices seemed nothing to me in that moment; every wrong he had done, every pain he had caused, vanished; his sufferings only were remembered; the wrench to the natural affections only was felt. If Man can thus experience total oblivion of his fellow's imperfections – how much more can the Eternal Being who made man, forgive his creature!
Charlotte Brontë's hopes that her wretched brother would find forgiveness in Heaven were bolstered by the change she had seen come over him during the last days of his life. As death approached, Branwell Brontë's unquiet mind seems to have left off its pursuit of phantoms and concentrated on the requisite for grace: repentance. As she envisaged God's pardon for the brother who had brought such misery on his family, Charlotte felt able to forgive him too.
The necessity of repentance before God was discussed above; but anyone who hopes for Divine mercy must also make his peace with his fellow creatures. The Lord's Prayer makes God's forgiveness conditional on the penitent's ability to exercise mercy in his turn, and human reconciliation features prominently in the fiction of the Brontës.
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- The Brontës and Religion , pp. 119 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999