It is great and noble! It awakes a reverence for God’s work!

“It is great and noble! It awakes a reverence for God’s work!” is Hans Brinker’s answer to the claim that surgery is ugly. First spoken in a tense exchange with Dr. Boekman, the words return years later as Hans’s private measure of the medical life he has built: even when the work is trying, he remains convinced that it is worthy.

The First Assertion

Dr. Boekman calls surgery “an ugly business” and tells Hans that it requires patience, self-denial, and perseverance. Hans agrees that it demands wisdom, too, but rejects the doctor’s judgment of the work itself. Flushed and close to tears, he insists that surgery is “great and noble” because it awakens reverence for God’s creation. He then apologizes for speaking so boldly.

The moment exposes both the force of Hans’s conviction and the social pressure surrounding his speech. Dr. Boekman turns away to confer with Laurens Boekman, while Dame Brinker warns Hans with a scowl: she knows that people of status may resent a poor boy speaking so directly. Hans’s apology acknowledges that imbalance, but does not retract his belief. His words treat the doctor’s skill not as mere technical labor, but as an encounter with the dignity and vulnerability of human life.

A Vocation Reaffirmed

The expression gains its full weight in the conclusion, where the narrator looks back over the years Hans has spent pursuing his goal. Hans has met obstacles with energy and resolution; the road has often been rugged, and at times he echoes the doctor’s phrase that surgery is ugly. Yet the narrator says that the truer words remain with him: “It is great and noble! It awakes a reverence for God’s work!”

The contrast between the two sayings does not mean Hans has forgotten the difficulty of medicine. The doctor’s description continues to name its trials; Hans’s reply gives those trials a purpose. The repeated phrase links the outspoken boy in the cottage to the famous Dr. Brinker who, years later, visits patients in his grand coach or skates with his own children on a frozen canal. His success has not displaced the principle that first drew him toward the work.

Faith in Everyday Life

The expression’s appeal to God belongs to a story in which religious feeling is also shown through ordinary domestic practice. On Saint Nicholas’s Eve, Dame Brinker hopes that the family’s stolen money might be restored. She says she has prayed to the saint to trouble the thieves’ sleep or sharpen the family’s wits so they can find the money themselves. When Hans objects, she defends her Protestant faith while maintaining that there is no wrong in sometimes turning to Saint Nicholas. Her prayer joins religious hope to the urgent practical need of a poor household.

The novel also presents Saint Nicholas’s festival as a time of moral instruction: the saint praises children’s charity and thrift, rebukes cruelty to an animal, and warns against misbehavior. Elsewhere, Sunday bells lead Ben to reflect that Christians remain connected despite divisions of sect and difference. These scenes do not explain Hans’s statement directly, but they place its language of reverence within a world where faith is expressed through ritual, moral conduct, and attention to others.

The Saying’s Narrative Work

The phrase is shaped by a sharp reversal: the same work the doctor calls ugly becomes, in Hans’s view, a source of reverence. Its force comes not from denying surgery’s hardships but from setting them beside its human and spiritual significance. At the end of the novel, the earlier confrontation is no longer only a moment when a boy dares to contradict an authority. Recalled after Hans has spent years in medicine, his words become a concise statement of the conviction that has endured alongside his effort.