The Concept of Complicity in Howells' Fiction

he preached the old Christ-humanity ... and enforced again the lessons that no one for good or for evil, for sorrow or joy, for sickness or health, stood apart from his fellows, but each was bound to the highest and lowest by ties that centred in the hand of God. No man ... sinned or suffered to himself alone; his error and his pain darkened and afflicted men who never heard of his name. If a community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators. It was not the tyrant who oppressed, it was the wickedness that had made him possible. The gospel--Christ-God, so far as men had imagined him,-was but a lesson, a type, a witness from everlasting to everlasting of the spiritual unity of man.2

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