he tidings of forgiveness
made easy and perfect, that none will be willing to waste even an hour in
enmity. Raging foes in the heat of their first wrath will bethink
themselves ere they smite, and come to me for a more perfect satisfaction
of their feud than any vengeance could promise."

Henry suddenly stopped in his restless pacing, stepped on tiptoe to the
slightly opened door of the retiring room, and peered anxiously in. He
thought he heard a slight stir. But no; she was still sleeping deeply,
her position quite unchanged. He drew noiselessly back, and again almost
closed the door.

"I suppose," resumed the doctor, after a pause, "that I must prepare
myself as soon as the process gets well enough known to attract attention
to be roundly abused by the theologians and moralists. I mean, of course,
the thicker-headed ones. They'll say I've got a machine for destroying
conscience, and am sapping the foundations of society. I believe that is
the phrase. The same class of people will maintain that it's wrong to
cure the moral pain which results from a bad act who used to think it
wrong to cure the physical diseases induced by vicious indulgence. But
the outcry won't last long, for nobody will be long in seeing that the
morality of the two kinds of cures is precisely the same, If one is
wrong, the other is. If there is something holy and God-ordained in the
painful consequences of sin, it is as wrong to meddle with those
consequences when they are physical as when they are mental. The alleged
reformatory effect of such suffering is as great in one case as the
other. But, bless you, nobody nowadays holds that a doctor ought to
refuse to set a leg which its owner broke when drunk or fighting, so that
the man may limp through life as a warning to himself and others.

"I know some foggy-minded people hold in a vague way that the working of
moral retribution is somehow more intelligent, just, and equitable than
the working of physical retribution. They have a nebulous notion that the
law of moral retribution is in some peculiar way God's law, while the law
of physical retribution is the law of what they call nature, somehow not
quite so much God's law as the other is. Such an absurdity only requires
to be stated to be exposed. The law of moral retribution is precisely as
blind, deaf, and meaningless, and entitled to be respected just as
little, as the law of physical retribution. Why, sir, of the two, the
much-abused law of