ity, violating at the some time the first right
of his fellow-man.

We have an instinctive horror of blood, human blood. For the ordinary
individual the Mosaic enactment that forbids murder is almost
superfluous, so deeply has nature graven on our hearts the letter of
that law. Murder is abominable, for the very reason that life is
precious; and no reasonable being, civilized or savage, dealing death
unjustly unto a fellow-man, can have any other conviction in his soul
than that he is committing a crime and incurring the almighty wrath of
the Deity. If such killing is done by a responsible agent, and against
the right of the victim, the crime committed is murder or unjustifiable
homicide.

Which supposes that there is a kind of homicide that is justifiable, in
seeming contradiction of the general law of God and nature, which
specifies no exception. But there is a question here less of exception
than of distinction. The law is a general one, of vast comprehension.
Is all killing prohibited? Evidently no. It is limited to human beings,
in the first place; to responsible agents, in the next; and thirdly, it
involves a question of injustice. What is forbidden is the voluntary
and unjust killing of a human being. Having thus specified according to
the rules of right reasoning, we find we have a considerable margin
left for the taking of life that is justifiable. And the records of
Divine revelation will approve the findings of right reason.

We find God in the Old Law, while upholding His fifth precept,
commanding capital punishment and sanctioning the slaughter of war; He
not only approved the slaying of certain persons, but there are
instances of His giving authority to kill. By so doing He delegated His
supreme right over life to His creatures. "Whoever sheds human blood,
let his blood be shed." In the New Testament the officer of the law is
called the minister of God and is said not without cause to carry the
sword; and the sword is the symbol of the power to inflict death.

The presence of such laws as that of capital punishment, of war and of
self-defense, in all the written codes of civilized peoples, as well as
in the unwritten codes of savage tribes, can be accounted for only by a
direct or indirect commission from the Deity. A legal tradition so
universal and so constant is a natural law, and consequently a divine
law. In a matter of such importance all mankind could not have erred;
if it has, it is perfectly s