The Quality of Mercy

by John Comer

An author’s first novel doesn’t normally generate the expectations one might harbor for the work of a proven best-selling writer. So when my wife bought Owen Parry’s Faded Coats of Blue for me, I knew she had wasted her money and I wouldn’t like the book. Wrong! I’ve now found the sequel to it, and hope more will soon follow. It’s well researched, believable, humorous, and filled with quotable sayings.

Here’s the story line: Abel Jones, a Welshman through and through, who used to fight for the British Queen Victoria in India, now serves Abraham Lincoln as a special military agent in the Union army.

But it’s the man, Abel Jones himself, who has me hooked. Whatever else Abel is, he’s a Methodist. And he’s strongly convinced it would be a better America if everyone shared the mettle and morality of his coreligionists especially if their Methodism were of the Welsh variety.

Abel is wise enough to know, however, that the world contains all sorts of people, and he knows the Lord expects him to see the best in all of them. His Washington, D.C., German landlady, Mrs. Schutzenegel, an avowed Communist and faithful reader of Karl Marx, is also somewhat over-large, and Abel speaks of her “vastness” as that of a “great door-filling woman.” “Yet, delicate in her feelings she was,” he notes. She was “a bulwark of all that is good and homely.”

One of Abel’s associates, a thief and all-round lowlife, leads him to observe that “Jesus himself got more respect from a thief than from a king,” and that “society folk only made time for our Savior when they needed their water turned into wine in a hurry.”

In the second novel, a gentle couple who may have been something akin to the Amish, save Abel’s life and care for him through a long recovery. He describes them as living in mercy’s dominion, and practicers of true religion. “’Tis kindness, not severity, that lets us gain a little peek at Heaven,” Abel says, and “Those who would put harshness in religion are no Christians worthy of the name.” “I say we must keep true religion from the grip of the old and bitter, and place it in the hands of those who love.”

God told his prophet Hosea that he desired mercy, not sacrifice. My newly found friend Abel Jones seems to know the meaning and value of these words. We could all use more friends like Abel.