The Seed of Evil-Doers

I recently finished listening to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It was a complex story of two families filled with hatred, jealousy, and total disfunction. I’m not sure that I really enjoyed the book, though I did appreciate that there was some resolution in the end. One of the main characters, Heathcliff, was adopted as a young boy and subsequently favored over the two other children I the family, Catherine and Hindley, by the father. This causes extreme animosity to develop between Heathcliff and Hindley, and after the former was beaten by the latter, he vowed to get revenge. Heathcliff and Catherine eventually became in love with each other, but Catherine decided to marry another man, Edgar Linton, instead. This caused Heathcliff to also come to hate the Linton family, and he spent about twenty years exacting revenge on everyone. Through his calculated actions he eventually gained possession of the properties of both families and had cruel dominion over the next generation. There were two left of them, Cathy and Hareton, both confined to his oppressive and abusive home. But then something Heathcliff had not planned for happened—these two chose to love instead of hate, and they were decided to be married. This would disrupt Heathcliff’s plans related to inheritance and ruining the two families. Heathcliff commented at that point to another character: “[Is this not] an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.” And he finally stopped his terrible work of seeking to take revenge on the two families, dying shortly thereafter, perhaps with a kind of change of heart. For me the book was a warning about the terrible effects of seeking revenge to wrongs done to us. Heathcliff was a miserable man throughout the story, and so are we when we let hatred drive us to seek retribution for ourselves whether in small or big things.

The scripture that came to my mind when I finished the story was this one from Isaiah: “The seed of evil-doers shall never be renowned” (2 Nephi 24:20). To me the verse implies that if we spend our lives in evil and seeking only our own interest in selfish ways, the legacy we leave will be forgotten or reversed. We will not make a lasting impact because future generations will undue our work. This is what Cathy told to Heathcliff towards the end of the novel: “You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you—nobody will cry for you when you die! I wouldn’t be you!” No one would mourn his death because he had been so selfish and mean during his life. But when we devote our lives to doing good and seeking to serve the Lord, our legacy and impact can last for generations. What the Savior said of Oliver Granger can be said of all of those who seek to serve Him faithfully: “His name shall be had in sacred remembrance from generation to generation, forever and ever” (Doctrine and Covenants 117:12). The good we seek to do will always have a more powerful impact upon the world and the future than the evil some choose to do. And even if what we try to do goes unnoticed by most, the Lord always sees us and will reward us in his own way for choosing love over hate, forgiveness over revenge, and kindness over selfishness. In other words, we must always choose Jesus and to live by these words: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).