ct. What right have you to hang any poor
creature "for an example"? He can turn round upon you and say, "Why make
an 'example' of me, a merely ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no
more respect for misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred.
And yet you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out
of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me, for your
own convenience alone?"--All "revenge" being out of the question, it
seems to me the caitiff is unanswerable; and he and the philanthropic
platforms have the logic all on their side.

The one answer to him is: "Caitiff, we hate thee; and discern for some
six thousand years now, that we are called upon by the whole Universe
to do it. Not with a diabolic but with a divine hatred. God himself, we
have always understood, 'hates sin,' with a most authentic, celestial,
and eternal hatred. A hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable,
which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black
annihilation and disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it
as the path of a flaming sword: he that has eyes may see it, walking
inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the
chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with
unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and
life-worthy; making all Human History, and the Biography of every man, a
God's Cosmos in place of a Devil's Chaos. So is it, in the end; even
so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous beast, and has eyes to
see. To thee, caitiff, these things were and are, quite incredible;
to us they are too awfully certain,--the Eternal Law of this Universe,
whether thou and others will believe it or disbelieve. We, not to
be partakers in thy destructive adventure of defying God and all the
Universe, dare not allow thee to continue longer among us. As a palpable
deserter from the ranks where all men, at their eternal peril, are bound
to be: palpable deserter, taken with the red band fighting thus against
the whole Universe and its Laws, we--send thee back into the whole
Universe, solemnly expel thee from our community; and will, in the name
of God, not with joy and exultation, but with sorrow stern as thy own,
hang thee on Wednesday next, and so end."

Other ground on which to deliberately slay a disarmed fellow-man I can
see none. Example, effects upon the public mind, effects upon this and
upon that: all this is m