lecturer publicly denied the right of either God or man to
invade his individuality, by taking vengeance upon him for any crime
whatever. Thousands, who are not yet Pantheists, are so far infected
with the poison that they utterly deny any right of vindictive
punishment to God or man.

But this is not all. Again and again have we listened with astonishment
to men, declaring that there was no moral law--no standard of right and
wrong, but the will of the community. Of course it was quite natural,
after such a declaration, to assert that a wife who should remain with a
husband of inferior intellectuality, or unsuitable emotions, was
committing adultery; that private property is a legalized robbery; and
that when a citizen becomes mentally or physically unfit for the
business of life, he confers the highest obligation on society, and
performs the highest duty to himself, by committing suicide, and thus
returning to the great ocean of being!

We might think that confusion of right and wrong could not be worse
confounded than this; yet there is a blacker darkness still. _The
distinction between good and evil is absolutely denied._ The Hindoo
Pantheists declare that they can not sin, because they are God, and God
can not offend against himself; there is no sin--it is all
_maya_--delusion. So the American and English school tells us it lives
only in the obsolete theology. Evil, we are told, "is good in another
way we are not skilled in."[32] So says the author of "Representative
Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making;
that pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It
is not to be entertained by a rational agent. It is Atheism; it is the
last profanation." "The divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in
the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers; and man, though in
brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and
true."[33]

Emerson, in a lecture in Cincinnati, is reported by the editor of _The
Central Herald_, as saying in his hearing: "To say that the majority of
men are wicked, is only to say that they are young." "Every man is
indebted to his vices--virtues grow out of them as a thrifty and
fruitful plant grows out of manure." "There is hope even for the
reprobate, and the ruffian, in the fullness of time."

If these were only the ravings of lunatics, or the dreamings of
philosophers, we should never have hunted them from their hidi