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The first of these propositions is one of nature's strongest arguments for a Deity; the second is perhaps the strongest, for the fact that the Deity is such a conscious and personal existence as can hold communication with reasoning minds. The first goes to establish monotheism; the second sends a death-stab to the heart of pantheism.

We find ourselves led, then, by the path trodden by Mr. Carlyle, to the throne where God sits, King of the universe. We shall endeavor to eliminate a theory of law in consistence with this great truth. If the hero is to be worshiped as a god, the scoundrel is to be hated as a devil; the revenge theory may then be defended: but the fact may be different, if there never was any such thing as strict worship of heroes-if hero and scoundrel are the subjects of one living God.

We desire to make no show of metaphysics here: we write with a practical purpose, and in a popular form; and, therefore rest all on an appeal to men as they are represented in history, and as they feel in their hearts. But there is one argument of perhaps a somewhat metaphysical nature, which is extremely simple, and seems to bear very strongly against the theory of revenge; it we adduce in the outset. It proceeds on the hypothesis that there is an intelligent and almighty Governor of the universe. We introduce it by a well-known quotation:

"Alas! alas!

Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy: How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made."

We can not consider this a mere echo of popular sentiment on the part of Shakspeare: we suspect these words came from depths in the greatest merely human heart that ever beat; we think we see in them one of those thoughts that pierce farthest into eternity. When thinking or speaking of the Infinite Being, we can not proceed by calculation of degrees: absolute purity is stained by a mote as certainly as by a whole atmosphere of hell's darkness. If it is the eternal law of justice that the reasonable being affected with sin be hated, we can not go about to say, so much will be hated, so much will be tolerated, and so on. Now, Mr. Carlyle will certainly not deny that sin adheres to the whole human race: set on a ground of perfect light, he will allow our species, as a whole, to look black. He sees a brother man commit some atrocious crime: with what he calls a glow of divine wrath, he slays him. It being a divine emotion to hate that being because affected with sin, it must be also divine, in one of absolute holiness, to hate and exterminate every creature so affected, even by the smallest speck that infinite light can reveal. If this is so, how is it that the human race exists? How is it that God did not lift His foot in anger, and crush our planet into annihilation as a loathsome worm staining the azure of immensity? Really there is no answer: if hatred is the highest and holiest emotion with which a man can regard a fellow-creature affected with sin, if this fact is the real foundation of justice, and if an infraction of justice here is an infraction of essential right, there can not be conceived a reason, we might say a possibility, that a sinful species could subsist in God's world. And is there a living man, or has there ever been a man, who could deliberately consider that his distance from the purity of the Infinitely Holy was less than the distance of his most sinful brother from him? Is there any of the sons of men who could deliberately chal

lenge his Maker to cast a stone at him? If such there be, let him hold to the theory that hatred and revenge are the emotions with which God regards the sinner; if there is none such, that theory chains the noblest human soul that ever existed on the eternal rock of despair.

This preliminary consideration leads us to a distinction which lies at the basis of all that is to follow-that, namely, between moral evil and the soul it pollutes. This distinction Mr. Carlyle overlooks or ignores, yet on it all depends. God, we most certainly hold, does eternally and infinitely hate sin, and no bounds are to be placed to the hatred with which it is right for men to regard it; but precisely as "hero-worship" was found not to indicate infinite love and honor as due to men, but as directed toward the fountain of light, so the efforts men have made to exterminate the excessively wicked from among them, indicate hatred of their brethren only in a secondary and temporary sense, and point chiefly to the abyss of blackness which their iniquity reveals. The whole moral universe seems to us to be whelmed in a confusion as of returning chaos, if this distinction is not rigidly adhered to.

We can not be required to prove the possibility of drawing this great distinction, or its reality when drawn; and, convinced that we can appeal to the instincts of men, we intentionally fortify it by no metaphysical arguments. Every man could understand and sympathize with Coleridge, when he said he would tolerate men, but for principles he would have no toleration. The present Christian sees no mystery in that passage where God is asserted to have no pleasure in the death of the sinner, although the whole Bible testifies His exterminating abhorrence of sin. And have not men ever borne witness to an instinctive feeling of this distinction? Bad as the world is, there perhaps was never a scaffold erected, and a

man put to death upon it, for whom, whatever his crime, certain eyes in the crowd were not filled with the dew of pity. Have not some nations treated the condemned, previously to their execution, with condoling kindness? Or what find we in that spectacle exhibited in Paris, on the autumn evening in 1792, which Mr. Carlyle has painted for us as with the brush of Michael Angelo? The Septembriseurs, maddened with rage, their arms to the elbow clotted with gore, their whole aspect that of unchained demons, clasped to their breasts, with the audible weeping of irrepressible joy, any one among the prisoners who was pronounced guiltless and snatched from the jaws of death. Even they witnessed to the fact that it is a stern work for man to be the executioner of man. It is the mark of the evil one perceived on a fellow-creature that is hated, not that creature himself. Would to God, men say from their inmost hearts, we could part this evil from you; but we can not, and we must expel it from the midst of us; you must go with it. The tainted spot must be cut out; but while the knife is being whetted, the tear is being shed. Mr. Carlyle acknowledges this general fact, but, if well pondered, we think it goes far to invalidate his theory. To account for it, without recognizing the distinction we have stated, will be found difficult. The indulgence of every desire and propensity is, by a recognized psychological law, associated with a pleasurable sensation. When a man kills another in the fury of revenge, he assuredly experiences a momentary relief and gratification. By our distinction, all becomes consistent; the passion is left in the enjoyment of its own pleasure; the pain arises from another source yet to be seen.

Let it not be supposed that we allege that revenge performs no function in human affairs; we do believe it to have a function. This we shall presently endeavor to indicate; but we

now concede that, even in the precise mode in which Mr. Carlyle pictures its exercise, it may, in rare cases, come legitimately into action.

"The forked weapon of the skies can send

Illumination into deep, dark holds,

Which the mild sunbeam hath not power to pierce."

Where the calm voice of law can not be heard, or its hand can not strike, then revenge may start forth to assert humanity and justice,

Keeping steadily in view the distinction between the sinner and his sin, we proceed to exhibit briefly what we deem the real origin and function of human law.

We find man, in all ages and circumstances, present two great aspects: that of the individual; and that of the civis, or member of society. We must say one or two words of each.

It is not a mere theological dogma that man is king of this lower world that his relation to his fellows is different from that he bears to the inferior animals. Is there not a certain mystical sacredness attaching to the life of a man? Is there any degree of idiocy or insanity which will turn aside that flaming sword with which conscience pursues the murderer? In the remotest desert, in the depth of the sequestered wood, why is it that he who deliberately slays his fellow feels that he is not unseen?—that, though no human power will ever reach him, there is a tribunal before which he will appearOne to whom his brother's blood can cry even from the ground? Is it not because there is a sense in which all men are equal-their differences relative, their equality essential? And what but this can we understand by the inherent majesty imputed by sages and poets to men? What but this renders

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