Folly Flanders

I recently read Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders, the fascinating novel set in the seventeenth-century. It tells the tale of poor Moll’s descent into criminality and wantonness, though she gets a rather happy ending after various comings and goings. Yet there is one scene where she is in gaol awaiting the hangman, when she seems to have a religious experience, and a visiting minister causes her to repent and trust in Christ. After this, however, she receives a reprieve, and the spiritual awakening seems to have been forgotten. Although her later years are spent happy and contented in Virginia, the Christian hope she desired in the London prison was nothing more than a flash in a very dark pan. Defoe was a Presbyterian and understood Christian doctrine well enough; his implications are quite deliberate. For her soul’s sake, it might have been better she hanged; for the story's happy ending, she moved on and emigrated. Yet it is better to die by the hangman and go to be with Christ than to die a natural death in a comfortable bed and go who-knows-where.

Sometimes, happy endings do not result in happy endings.

I communed with my heart, saying, “Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge.” And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind.

For in much wisdom is much grief,
And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow."  Ecc 1:16-18, NKJV