Relationship At times I feel an ache, an inner loneliness that cripples me. But I forget about God. I forget that God loves me, and actually wants a relationship with me. A Christian friend of mine told me that God has emotions. Not that he’s defensive and unstable, but he loves me and is sad when I turn away from him. He feels sadness when I’m hurt, and feels love and joy at my happiness. I matter to him. He isn’t an emotionless deity, watching from afar and not caring. He doesn’t go about his plans without caring if I’m involved. What I do matters to him. What I say matters. How I treat him. If I spend time with him. He loves me, and just as I would be hurt if someone I love rejected me, he’s hurt when I reject him. Just as I feel sad when someone I love is sad, or I’m in pain when they’re upset — God’s the same. He aches when I’m upset. He actually loves me. He cries when I cry. If only I could see it. Any pain I feel would be diminished in light of God’s love. He cares about every part of me. If only I could see it.
If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year, and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.
In 1760, at thirty-five years of age, Clive returned to England with a fortune of at least £300,000 and the quit-rent of £27,000 a year, after caring for the comfort of his parents and sisters, and giving Major Lawrence, his old commanding officer, who had early encouraged his military genius, £500 a year. The money had been honourably and publicly acquired, with the approval of the Company. The amount might have been four times what it was had Clive been either greedy after wealth or ungenerous to the colleagues and the troops whom he led to victory. In the five years of his conquests and administration in Bengal, the young man had crowded together a succession of exploits which led Lord Macaulay, in what that historian termed his "flashy" essay on the subject, to compare him to Napoleon Bonaparte. But there was this difference in Clive's favour, due not more to the circumstances of the time than to the object of his policy--he gave peace, security, prosperity and such liberty as the case allowed of to a people now reckoned at nearly three hundred millions, who had for centuries been the prey of oppression, while Napoleon's career of conquest was inspired only by personal ambition, and the absolutism he established vanished with his fall. During the three years that Clive remained in England he sought a political position, chiefly that he might influence the course of events in India, which he had left full of promise. He had been well received at court, had been made Baron Clive of Plassey, in the peerage of Ireland, had bought estates, and had got not only himself, but his friends returned to the House of Commons after the fashion of the time. Then it was that he set himself to reform the home system of the East India Company, and began a bitter warfare with Mr Sulivan, chairman of the court of directors, whom in the end he defeated. In this he was aided by the news of reverses in Bengal. Vansittart, his successor, having no great influence over Jafar Ali Khan, had put Kasim Ali Khan, the son-in-law, in his place in consideration of certain payments to the English officials. After a brief tenure Kasim Ali had fled, had ordered Walter Reinhardt (known to the Mahommedans as Sumru), a Swiss mercenary of his, to butcher the garrison of 150 English at Patna, and had disappeared under the protection of his brother viceroy of Oudh. The whole Company's service, civil and military, had become demoralized by gifts, and by the monopoly of the inland as well as export trade, to such an extent that the natives were pauperized, and the Company was plundered of the revenues which Clive had acquired for them. The court of proprietors, accordingly, who elected the directors, forced them, in spite of Sulivan, to hurry out Lord Clive to Bengal with the double powers of governor and commander-in-chief. Entry: CLIVE