Charles Dickens on Cain’s question

An answer from beyond the grave

Cain, in the story told in the fourth chapter of Genesis, was the first born son of Adam and Eve who killed his brother Abel. When God asked him where Abel was, he said he wasn’t responsible for keeping track of his brother. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he asked. The question eventually became a central question of politics, even though many don’t know that’s the question they’re asking. Charles Dickens answered it in A Christmas Carol.

Cain

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Jacob Marley’s ghost

“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know . . . that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

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