One of the most startling things I heard someone say was, “My grandmother was a slave.”

The person speaking was a minister and friend, older than me, but not old. I did the math quickly in my head and realized that slavery in America is not ancient history after all. It isn’t even history. I certainly didn’t consider my own grandmother—who was very much alive at the time of this conversation and lived another twenty-five or thirty years more—to be history. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother being a slave. I recognized how directly and profoundly my life, habits, and worldview had been shaped by her, and how different my own understanding and experience would be, in turn, if her life had been as radically different as the life of a slave. Everything about my own life would be different. I was struck by the truth of William Faulkner’s famous words, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”1 When we are born into a community, we are shaped by that community’s past as much as its present.

JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY

Justice is the morality of the community. The morality of a community shapes individual thinking, values, and behavior. Aristotle calls justice “anything just that tends to produce or preserve happiness and its constituents for the community of a city.”2 In The Republic, Plato says that virtue in an individual is “a certain health, beauty, and good condition of a soul.”3 Justice, therefore, can be understood as the virtue of a community, the harmony of all the souls that form it.

But although justice is enacted in community, each community is made up of individuals who together make a society just or unjust. The just society is the one that frees people to do good. In other words, a just society allows all of its members to cultivate the virtue of justice, for even individual ethics “are much affected by the ethos” of the community in which one lives.4

The virtue of justice is the habit of desiring and doing what is just.5 In “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, simply, “the just man justices.”6 At first glance, these definitions seem circular, saying, in essence, the just person is just. Yet it echoes the wisdom of one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers, Forrest Gump’s mother, who advised her mentally challenged son, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Justice is, in this sense, its own measure.

But justice also takes its measure from the relationship of one thing to another. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry defines justice as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”7 Justice is “an absolute good in itself” and is the measure of the other virtues since prudence, courage, and temperance can be virtuous only when oriented toward just ends.8 All external acts are socially consequential and therefore connected to justice in some way.9 Indeed, justice is “the whole of virtue,” according to Aristotle. The most excellent person, Aristotle says, is the one whose virtue is perfected in relationship to others, and justice is always expressed “in relation to another person.”10 Justice is the mean between selfishness and selflessness. That mean has implications within political, economic, social, and racial realms, just as it has implications for the inner life of the soul. Justice orders a person within herself as well as the lives of people together.11

TWO UNJUST CITIES

Charles Dickens’s masterpiece A Tale of Two Cities is the terrifying story of what happens to individuals, communities, and nations when injustice reigns. It has been said that A Tale of Two Cities is a story without a villain. Some say that history itself is the villain. But there is a villain in the story that is not confined to past events, a villain ever present in human affairs: the vice of excess.

A Tale of Two Cities is a story of extremes and of the havoc wreaked by such extremes, as the famous opening lines suggest: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”12 In other words, it was an age of polar extremes.

Excess, the novel shows, was both cause and symptom of the perilousness of the times. It was an age of superlatives, of disproportion, of absolutes, and of absolute power. Absolute power by its very nature is unjust,13 for it lacks the relational proportionality that defines justice. Set in a time so full of injustice, A Tale of Two Cities dramatizes the horrible consequences that attend justice too long delayed.

The two cities of the title are London and Paris. Each in its own way is unjust, but the point offered by Dickens the Englishman to his contemporaries, writing a century after the book’s events, is that his own country is not immune to those graver injustices perpetrated by a rival country during the previous age. In other words, the novel serves as a warning against injustice.

The daily life of London in 1775, when the novel opens, is riddled with theft and murder; not even the nobility or the mayor are safe. Just as they will in France later in the story, mobs rule here both outside the jails and in. The infamous Newgate prison, rather than being an instrument of justice, is a breeding ground for “debauchery and villainy” and “dire diseases,” a place from which “pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world,” many waylaid first at the pillory or the whipping post.14 But the ultimate punishment—death—is doled out to criminals like burnt porridge in a charity school. It is “a recipe much in vogue,” and hundreds of crimes are capital offenses: the forger, the bad-check writer, the purloiner, the horse thief, the counterfeiter—all these were punished by death.15 The hangman is “ever busy, . . . now stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.”16 Yet such extreme penalties do not even serve as a deterrent to crime. Indeed, “the fact was exactly the reverse.”17

In between crime and punishment, the court—the place that is supposed both to symbolize and to actually be the seat of justice—offers little hope. Jerry Cruncher, a messenger by day and grave robber by night, learns that one particular day’s docket concerns treason and ponders the punishment that will follow:

“That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”

“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”

“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to kill him, but it’s very hard to spile him, sir.”

“Not at all,” returned the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.”18

Here the clerk voices an unquestioning view of the law as always just. But as the story (along with history) proves, the law that is supposed to be just is not always so. Moreover, Cruncher’s objection here to “spiling” a man over and above killing him (the term could refer to spoiling his body or spilling his innards—or both—through quartering, which was legal in England until 1870) may not be entirely selfless: Cruncher moonlights as a body snatcher who sells body parts for medical study. The impossibility of pure disinterestedness is why justice is considered the hardest virtue to attain and why Aristotle declared (naively, I think we moderns must say) that the law, not individuals, is justice and that just individuals must obey it.19 It is also why Augustine, more wisely, says that “a law that is not just does not seem to me to be a law.”20

Echoing Augustine’s famous dictum that an unjust law is no law at all, Martin Luther King Jr. in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” further defined an unjust law: “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas [also drawing from Augustine]: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”21

In 1780, Dickens’s London court is trying Charles Darnay, a Frenchman, for spying for France. Darnay is an emigrant from France, and the crime he is being tried for—treason—attracts great interest because of the severity of both the crime and its punishment upon a verdict of guilty: “He’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters,” explains one observer eagerly, adding that a guilty verdict is certain.22 Darnay is innocent of the crime, but the jury is eager for blood. Indeed, many of the spectators have paid for admission. When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.

Darnay is unexpectedly acquitted, however, when his positive identification comes into question because of a man seated in the court who looks just like him. This man, Sydney Carton, years later will save Darnay’s life again.

But this is a tale of two cities, not one. The injustices taking place across the English Channel in Paris differ in style but not substance, in degree but not kind. Just as in England, France “entertained herself” with excessive, brutal injustice, such as “sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.”23

While it is likely a fiction that Marie Antoinette said of the starving peasants, “Let them eat cake!” Dickens’s own fiction captures the truth of this pervasive and perverse sentiment of the nobility in an exquisite chapter titled, “The Monseigneur in Town.” It was supposed to be the role of the noble class to serve as justices of the peace, but this Monseigneur cares nothing about justice:

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way—tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: “The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur.”24

When the Monseigneur arrives in the country, he passes a burial ground where a peasant woman grieving her husband’s death stops the carriage. She begs him,

“Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.”

“Again, well? Can I feed them?”

“Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don’t ask it. My petition is, that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s name, may be placed over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want.”25

But the Monseigneur has already driven on.

The nobility allows the wheels of injustice to roll, rather literally, right over the peasants when the villainous Marquis St. Evrémonde strikes and kills a child while speeding his carriage recklessly through town. Stopped by the crowd that feebly attempts to retaliate, his response is utterly inhumane: “‘You dogs!’ said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose: ‘I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.’”26

Such cruelty and injustice are so pervasive, so systemic, so expected by the peasants that it is taken as a matter of course, despite their useless outrage. “So cowed was their condition,” the narrator explains, “and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one.” Only one—a woman—dares to look the Marquis in the face. “It was not for his dignity to notice it,” however, and “his contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word ‘Go on!’”27

Incredibly, the Marquis is even more depraved than this scene reveals. Peel back the layers of injustice, one wrong followed by another and another, and at the center one usually finds the original wound, long forgotten. At the very center of the layers of injustice in A Tale of Two Cities—the catalyst from which all its events and relationships emerge—is the brutal and fatal rape of a young peasant woman, perpetrated by the Marquis’s brother—the father of Charles Darnay, who is husband to the novel’s heroine, Lucie.

A SPIRAL OF INJUSTICE

Making the central event of the novel a brutal rape that occurs years before the story opens is a significant artistic move in a number of ways. First, it is counterintuitive for a work and writer so quintessentially Victorian—an era widely regarded for its prudish and repressed attitude toward sexuality. Despite being veiled by subtle narrative devices, this event forms symbolically and structurally a spiral of injustice. In terms of plot, the rape takes the life first of the victim, then of her husband and her brother; afterward, it destroys the family of the perpetrator; then the victim’s sister grows up to take murderous revenge on countless others as part of the counterrevolution.

Furthermore, the fatal rape of a peasant woman by a member of the ancien regime is symbolically significant within the context of the French Revolution, as well as within the larger theme of justice as a virtue. For this horrific rape and its consequences illustrate how all injustice works: the injustice of one person against another cannot be contained. Injustice, no matter how seemingly private, always has public consequences. The masses would soon revolt against such depraved excesses and achieve excesses of their own in the Reign of Terror that began in 1793.

The vice that opposes the virtue of justice is anger. Anger in and of itself is not wrong, of course. The Bible tells us to “be angry and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26 ESV), making clear that anger itself is not sin. But excessive anger distorts justice, turning it into vengeance.

A Tale of Two Cities personifies the spirit of vengeance fueling the Terror in the character of Madame Defarge, who, along with her close ally (nicknamed, fittingly, The Vengeance), furiously weaves into her knitting the names of all those destined for execution at the hands of the mob. The mob “stopped at nothing,” the story says, “and was a monster much dreaded.”28 Like the fatal overcorrection of a wayward car, the revolutionaries, so long oppressed, prove more unjust than those who had wronged them: “The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.”29

The mobs murder those in power who they have determined—or suspect or imagine or do not even imagine—have committed wrongs against the people. The nobleman Foulon, who has told the starving peasants to eat grass, becomes a particular target of the mob’s vengeance. When word comes that they have at last taken him and he is still alive, the crowds echo a vicious refrain: “Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him!”30

Dickens’s brilliant prose mimics the relentless rhythms of the crowd’s cries and the brutal images of the mob possessed by the energy and power that fuel their vengeance, carrying the reader along vicariously within the chaos wreaked by injustice:

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung . . . the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.31

The mob’s treatment of prisoners defies rhyme and reason. Some arrested are freed only to be capriciously hacked to bits as they leave. One prisoner is released only to be stabbed on his way out, then helped by folks sitting atop the bodies of their murdered victims. It’s “an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare.”32 Over four days, eleven hundred prisoners—which include men and women and children—are killed by the mobs.33

Yet this is the crucial point that the narrative makes clear: there “could have been no such Revolution if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.”34 It is not mere injustice that brought about the Revolution, but excessive, inhumane, and prolonged injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. would exclaim a century later, in response to the societal admonition to “wait” longer for justice: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”35

AN ABYSS OF DESPAIR

The justice system in eighteenth-century France was such an abyss of despair, in fact, that the implementation of the guillotine as a form of execution near the start of the Revolution was considered more humane than former methods, which included hanging, burning, boiling, dismemberment, the breaking wheel, and decapitation by sword. Indeed, the guillotine was viewed as such a “modern” method of execution that it was used in France until 1977. A Tale of Two Cities shows, however, that merely implementing a kinder, gentler method to execute an unjust sentence is but a faux mercy.

Dickens indicts his own nation of England, as well, despite its veneer of greater civility. The English mobs that open the novel foreshadow the Terror that comes to France. In England, public trials and executions had become, as noted above, a national form of barbaric entertainment. Not coincidentally, many of the first penal reforms in England, begun just before and during Dickens’s lifetime, were led by Christians. Christians were among the first to question widespread application of the death penalty as well as its treatment as a form of public entertainment. Dickens himself contributed to a developing consciousness of the depravity of such excessive punishment and the injustices that cultivated the criminal element in the underclass. Dickens feared that unchecked injustice in nineteenth-century England might re-create what unchecked injustice in France in the previous century had led to, and A Tale of Two Cities was his warning call.36

The novel’s vision exposes the truth that prolonged systemic injustice inevitably bears the bitter fruit of violence. The gothic obsession with blood and violence in A Tale of Two Cities sets it apart from Dickens’s other work (and is one reason some critics consider it inferior) but is central to its message. The excessive vengeance that feeds the guillotine, for example, takes on such life in the narrative that it is almost a character unto itself:

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.37

Here is a picture of injustice unleashed upon the world seemingly without limits. The detail is excessive—but that doesn’t make it gratuitous. The excess is the point.

LIGHTHOUSES IN THE DARK

Yet even such excessive injustice cannot extinguish the light of goodness. From such a vast and dark ocean of wrong, bright rays shine forth from small towers of fortitude, lighthouses in the dark.

For example, Miss Pross, the quiet, faithful servant of the heroine, Lucie Manette, shows a sudden burst of fierce loyalty and love when the vengeful Madame Defarge puts Lucie in her sights. The habit of love cultivated by Miss Pross, a prim and proper Englishwoman, primes her for a burst of courage, and “on the instinct of the moment,” she fights Madame Defarge with all her strength, “with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate.”38 During the struggle, Pross shoots and kills Madame Defarge. From the blast, Pross hears “first a great crash, and then a great stillness, and that stillness seems to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be broken any more as long as my life lasts.”39 She will never hear again. But she has saved the life of the innocent Lucie, the brightest light in this dark story, and the “golden thread” who weaves the tale and its people together.40

If justice is making right, then seeing people rightly is a form of justice. Lucie sees in Sydney Carton what others cannot, finding him deserving of consideration and respect. “I am sure,” she says of Carton in a moment of great foreshadowing, that he “is capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous things.”41 Yet even Lucie could not have imagined what Carton was capable of.

Carton blesses Lucie for this “sweet compassion” toward him.42 Yet love and compassion “cannot substitute for justice.”43 Compassion is individual and voluntary. It also has no cost.44 Justice, on the other hand, exacts a price. Because the world is broken, making what is wrong right is costly. In other words, justice requires sacrifice. For the sake of Lucie, Carton offers his life as sacrifice to the mob that demands the head of Lucie’s husband, Charles Darnay, who is guilty only of being born to those who abused their power—power Darnay has long renounced. Blinded by vengeance, the mob cares little about Darnay’s innocence.

Moral philosophers suggest that one way to measure one’s own virtue in the realm of justice is to ask, “Do you want your community to be better off with you than without you?”45 Sydney Carton “concludes that the world—and Lucie—need Charles more than him.”46 In a hint of foreshadowing, he confesses to Lucie, “I am like one who died young.” He says with regret, “All my life might have been.”47 Yet, in doing for others but not himself, Carton cannot truly be just. His lack of desire for his own flourishing is a vice.

THE VIRTUOUS MEAN

Justice avoids both selflessness and selfishness. Only when one attains this virtuous mean can one be just within oneself, and within one’s community, for justice is about giving everyone his or her due: oneself, others, and God. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Scripture admonishes (Matt. 22:39). Implicit in this command is the idea that one must love oneself and that one cannot love one’s neighbor properly without such love. One cannot love one’s neighbor properly if one loves oneself too much—or too little. In an important sense, then, the virtue of justice begins with justice toward the self.

On the surface, selflessness seems to be an unmitigated good, especially in an age in which selfishness is rampant. Yet the good of selflessness has limits. Consider the instructions given before every airplane takeoff that in the case of an emergency requiring use of an oxygen mask, anyone wanting to assist others must put a mask on oneself first. Taken to the extreme, selflessness is not less of self (which is generally good to a point) but the erasure of self (which is not good within any understanding of the intrinsic value of each human being).

Plato says that justice is the proper balancing or proportioning of all parts of the soul.48 The Christian view of the well-ordered soul identifies how to have all parts of the soul in proper order: by first loving God with all one’s heart, soul, strength, and mind. Justice concerns the right ordering of not only the relationships within a community but also the parts of a person’s soul.

Sydney Carton is self-effacing to a fault. His selflessness is not in proper proportion with healthy self-regard. He loves himself too little and therefore struggles through most of the story to love others well. An underachieving, drunken lawyer, Carton describes himself as “a disappointed drudge”49 and “a dissolute dog who has never done any good, and never will.”50 He says, “I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”51 Unable to love well with his life, he can love only with his death.

Of course, none of us is capable of perfect justice, even toward ourselves. Carton moves closer to justice by the story’s end, not only because of his heroic act but also because of the self-knowledge he gains in the process. The truth about justice in this world is that it can never set things exactly right. We never will, whether on the personal, the public, or the cosmic scale, be able to bring those delicate scales of justice into perfect balance. And in at least two senses, Carton’s sacrifice is not just. First, Charles Darnay’s arrest, imprisonment, and punishment were never justifiable in the first place. Even willing payment of an unjust penalty doesn’t seem just. Carton’s sacrifice is not just because Darnay’s death sentence, for which Carton substitutes himself, is not just. Second, it is not just to himself because his selflessness is not purely virtuous.

But it is fair.

FAIR JUSTICE

Although the words just and fair are often used interchangeably, justice usually involves objective, universal standards of judgment, while fairness is often felt subjectively as a sense of right proportion within particular circumstances. In a perfect world, what is just is also fair. In a fallen world, however, justice does not always feel fair. In our fallen humanity we often bristle at the holiness of a God whose justice does not always strike us as fair. The parable of the workers in the vineyard, all of whom are paid the same agreed-upon wage although some worked fewer hours, is a perplexing example of this (Matt. 20:1–16). A sacrifice to the injustice of the Reign of Terror, Carton’s death is not just, but it is fair in the sense that he chooses it and does so honorably and nobly. In a world devoid of perfect justice, he serves the one he loves and finds redemption in his sacrifice. But Carton’s sacrifice is fair in a more significant way that invokes the other sense of the word fair, which means not only “right” but also “beautiful.”52

Both justice and beauty are the expression of proper proportion.

In aesthetics, the perfect proportion is known as the golden ratio or golden mean. Named after a thirteenth-century mathematician, the Fibonacci numbers quantify the ideal ratio between length and width, a proportion found universally in beautiful faces, buildings, and throughout nature on both cosmic and microcosmic scales. The prevalence and consistency of this ratio offers a startling counter to the subjective (and modern) notion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Beauty arises from the unity of the separate parts. A note that sounds off in one song sounds lovely within the context of another. The Victorian settee that looks garish in a beachside cottage is perfectly suited to a turn-of-the-century mansion. The elegant neck of a giraffe would be absurd on a short-legged creature like a dachshund. Justice, likewise, cannot exist apart from the context of the community of people it serves.

Recall Elaine Scarry’s definition above of justice as a symmetry of our relations to each other. Symmetry is a factor of both beauty and justice. And while beauty and justice have objective qualities, they must be observed in order to be appreciated and cultivated. Both require, Scarry says, “constant perceptual acuity,” and in this way the perception of beauty can assist in the perception and correction of injustice.53 “It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level. Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care.”54 A “rigorous standard of perceptual care” is required to seek and uphold justice as well. Moreover, there is not one way of achieving justice any more than there is one way of being beautiful.

Justice requires a proportionate exchange. Carton’s act of self-sacrifice transcends mere equity. In this way, Carton’s death, while unjust, is beautiful. Likewise, when Christ took his place on the cross for the sake of humanity and paid the price in blood for the sins of the world, it wasn’t fair. But through his sacrifice, we are justified, and that is beautiful.

Justice in this world will ever and always be a matter of correcting, balancing—ever progressing (or regressing), never perfected. The injustice my friend’s grandmother experienced in being a slave did not end with her life. That injustice forever shaped her children, and her children’s children, including my friend. My friend forgives those injustices. But even forgiveness cannot negate the ripple effects of the past. To pretend otherwise is itself a further injustice.

With the endless injustices and causes that overwhelm us today, it’s common for us to set these concerns against one another as though one cause must compete against another: we must choose the cause of women or the poor, of religious liberty or the environment. We often think of justice as parcels of land, and we concern ourselves with the size and distribution of its lots.

But justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.

Carton’s last words as he approaches Madame Guillotine to rest his neck in her eternal embrace are fitting: “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Afterward, those who gazed on the spectacle of injustice said of Carton “that it was the peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there.”55

The story closes by describing the vision Carton sees as he mounts the scaffold to satisfy the bloodthirst and undergo the sacrifice that constitutes the greatest love. It is a vision of the beauty of justice not here but yet to come:

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. . . . It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.56