that I can prove, and very
likely indeed that I can persuade myself, that the shortening of the
life of one hard and grasping man may brighten the lives of hundreds.
And my passions will simply laugh at the attempt to restrain me by
arguing that great advantages result from the respect for human life
upon the whole. Appetites, greeds, resentments do not regard their
objects in this broad and colourless way; they grant the general
proposition, but add that every rule has its exceptions. Something more
is needed: something which can never be obtained except from a universal
law, from the sanctity of all human lives as bearing eternal issues in
their bosom, and from the certainty that He who gave the mandate will
enforce it.

It is when we see in our fellow-man a divine creature of the Divine,
made by God in His own image, marred and defaced by sin, but not beyond
recovery, when his actions are regarded as wrought in the sight of a
Judge Whose presence supersedes utterly the slightness, heat and
inadequacy of our judgment and our vengeance, when his pure affections
tell us of the love of God which passeth knowledge, when his errors
affright us as dire and melancholy apostacies from a mighty calling, and
when his death is solemn as the unveiling of unknown and unending
destinies, then it is that we discern the sacredness of life, and the
awful presumption of the deed which quenches it. It is when we realise
that he is our brother, holding his place in the universe by the same
tenure by which we hold our own, and dear to the same Father, that we
understand how stern is the duty of repressing the first resentful
movements within our breast which would even wish to crush him, because
they are a rebellion against the Divine ordinance and against the Divine
benevolence.

Is it asked, how can all this be reconciled with the lawfulness of
capital punishment? The death penalty is frequent in the Mosaic code.
But Scripture regards the judge as the minister and agent of God. The
stern monotheism of the Old Testament "said, Ye are Gods," to those who
thus pronounced the behest of Heaven; and private vengeance becomes only
more culpable when we reflect upon the high sanction and authority by
which alone public justice presumes to act.

Now, all these considerations vanish together, when religion ceases to
consecrate morality. The judgment of law differs from my own merely as I
like it better, and as I am a party (perhaps unwillingl