n, which have no
more reference to the fault which provokes them, than if you cut off
a man's finger because he made a bad use of his tongue. That is
part, but only a part, of what I meant just now, by saying that
people represent God as capricious, proud, revengeful.'

'But do not Protestants themselves confess that our sins provoke
God's anger?'

'Your common creed, when it talks rightly of God as one "who has no
passions," ought to make you speak more reverently of the
possibility of any act of ours disturbing the everlasting equanimity
of the absolute Love. Why will men so often impute to God the
miseries which they bring upon themselves?'

'Because, I suppose, their pride makes them more willing to confess
themselves sinners than fools.'

'Right, my friend; they will not remember that it is of "their
pleasant vices that God makes whips to scourge them." Oh, I at
least have felt the deep wisdom of that saying of Wilhelm Meister's
harper, that it is

"Voices from the depth of NATURE borne
Which woe upon the guilty head proclaim."

Of nature--of those eternal laws of hers which we daily break. Yes!
it is not because God's temper changes, but because God's universe
is unchangeable, that such as I, such as your poor father, having
sown the wind, must reap the whirlwind. I have fed my self-esteem
with luxuries and not with virtue, and, losing them, have nothing
left. He has sold himself to a system which is its own punishment.
And yet the last place in which he will look for the cause of his
misery is in that very money-mongering to which he now clings as
frantically as ever. But so it is throughout the world. Only look
down over that bridge-parapet, at that huge black-mouthed sewer,
vomiting its pestilential riches across the mud. There it runs, and
will run, hurrying to the sea vast stores of wealth, elaborated by
Nature's chemistry into the ready materials of food; which proclaim,
too, by their own foul smell, God's will that they should be buried
out of sight in the fruitful all-regenerating grave of earth: there
it runs, turning them all into the seeds of pestilence, filth, and
drunkenness.--And then, when it obeys the laws which we despise, and
the pestilence is come at last, men will pray against it, and
confess it to be "a judgment for their sins;" but if you ask WHAT
sin, people will talk about "les voiles d'airain," as Fourier says,
and tell you that it i