go on for ever? Will it never dawn
upon our priests and ministers, our masters and mistresses in schools,
that God bears none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks
because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the
weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is
woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on
them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god
in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your
brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you
apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of
consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all
the waters and baptisms, though it were of blood, through which the
Churches can pass you, will ever be able to efface.

How much knavery in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London
might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be
brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity,
adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and
prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the
creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their
ventures--quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal
law--can only be purchased by the tears and ruin of human beings? The
dogma of endless future punishment was apparently impotent to restrain
the ultra-orthodox directors of the Liberator Company, but I take it
that no man who had been schooled in Emerson, could have sat at that
board and thanked an Almighty God for the exceptional favours he had
been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The
vindictiveness of a purposeless hell has, of course, failed
ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite
Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply
for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we
refuse to associate them with God. What we do believe in, what we are
sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he
sows, that the consequences of his misdeeds are eternal, that--

All on earth he has made his own
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills, the sea will swim,
And like his shadow follow him.

[1] In what follows I have freely borrowed from the great "Essay on
Compensation".

VI.

CO