ven the
gentile world felt the need of a future state of rewards and
punishments to make the scale of Divine justice even, and satisfy the
cravings of the soul. Our sense of right, or of what we believe to be
right, is so pleased with an example of retribution that a single
instance is allowed to outweigh the many in which wrong escapes
unwhipped. It was remarked that sudden death overtook the purchasers of
certain property bequeathed for pious uses in England, and sequestered
at the Reformation. Fuller tells of a Sir Miles Pateridge, who threw
dice with the king for Jesus' bells, and how "the ropes after catched
about his neck," he being hanged in the reign of Edward VI. But at
least a fifth of the land in England was held by suppressed
monasteries, and the metal for the victorious cannon of revolutionary
France once called to the service of the Prince of Peace from
consecrated spires. We err in looking for a visible and material
penalty, as if God imposed a fine of mishap for the breach of his
statutes. Seldom, says Horace, has penalty lost the scent of crime,
yet, on second thought, he makes the sleuth-hound lame. Slow seems the
sword of Divine justice, adds Dante, to him who longs to see it smite.
The cry of all generations has been, "How long, O Lord?" Where crime
has its root in weakness of character, that same weakness is likely to
play the avenger; but where it springs from that indifference as to
means and that contempt of consequences which are likely to be felt by
a strong nature, intent upon its end, it would be hardy to reckon on
the same dramatic result. And if we find this difficulty in the cases
of individual men, it is even more rash to personify nations, and deal
out to them our little vials of Divine retribution, as if we were the
general dispensaries of doom. Shall we lay to a nation the sins of a
line of despots whom it cannot shake off? If we accept too blindly the
theory of national responsibility, we ought, by parity of reason, to
admit success as a valid proof of right. The moralists of fifty years
ago, who saw the democratic orgies of France punished with Napoleon,
whose own crimes brought him in turn to the rock of Prometheus, how
would they explain the phenomenon of Napoleon III.? The readiness to
trace a too close and consequent relation between public delinquencies
and temporal judgments seems to us a superstition holding over from the
time when each race, each family even, had its private a