In Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities, a young French aristocrat was condemned to die by the guillotine during the bloody French Revolution. His punishment was based solely on his forefathers’ crimes against the peasantry. The hour before his execution he was visited by a young English friend who could have passed for his twin. After the guard had left, the friend overpowered the doomed man with an anesthetic and exchanged clothes with him. Then, pretending to be the one condemned to die, he called the jailor and asked that his unconscious “visitor,” supposedly overcome with grief, be removed and returned to his home. The nobleman was thus saved from death.

On his way to the guillotine, the young Englishman spoke these final words: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.…” And he comforted himself with these words: “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."