God are always loaded. The world looks like a
multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you
will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor
more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime
is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence
and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by
which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there
must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to
which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a
twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in
the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the
retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the
soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding;
it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time
and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific
stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they
accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is
a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which
concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit,
cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end
preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we seek
to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,--to gratify
the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of
the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the
solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual
strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep,
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper
surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an
other end. The soul says, 'Eat;' the body would feast. The soul says,
'The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul;' the body would join
the flesh only. The soul says, 'Have dominion over all things to the
ends of virtue;' the body would have the power over things to its own
ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would
be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,--power, pleasur