ding the rest, and laying our command upon it never
to cross our threshold without our order. Like all things that only
can live at the cost of our spiritual strength, it will soon learn to
obey. At first, perhaps, it will endeavour to resist. It will have
recourse to artifice and prayer. It will try to tempt us, to cajole.
It will drag forward frustrated hopes and joys that are gone for ever,
broken affections, well-merited reproaches, expiring hatred and love
that is dead, squandered faith and perished beauty; it will thrust
before us all that once had been the marvellous essence of our ardour
for life; it will point to the beckoning sorrows, decaying happiness,
that now haunt the ruin. But we shall pass by, without turning our
head; our hand shall scatter the crowd of memories, even as the sage
Ulysses, in the Cimmerian night, with his sword prevented the
shades--even that of his mother, whom it was not his mission to
question--from approaching the black blood that would for an instant
have given them life and speech. We shall go straight to the joy, the
regret or remorse, whose counsel we need; or to the act of injustice we
wish scrupulously to examine, in order either to make reparation, if
such still be possible, or that the sight of the wrong we did, whose
victims have ceased to be, is required to give us the indispensable
force that shall lift us above the injustice it still lies in us to
commit.

9

Yes, even though our past contain crimes that now are beyond the reach
of our best endeavours, even then, if we consider the circumstances of
time and place, and the vast plane of each human existence, these
crimes fade out of our life the moment we feel that no temptation, no
power on earth, could ever induce us to commit the like again. The
world has not forgiven--there is but little that the external sphere
will forget or forgive--and their material effects will continue, for
the laws of cause and effect differ from those which govern our
consciousness. At the tribunal of our personal justice, however--the
only tribunal which has decisive action on our inaccessible life, as it
is the only one whose decrees we cannot evade, whose concrete judgments
stir us to our very marrow--the evil action that we regard from a
loftier plane than that at which it was committed, becomes an action
that no longer exists for us save in so far as it may serve in the
future to render our fall more difficult; nor has it the