esponsible for a hanging. Men cannot blame the judge
for the gallows; the fault is their own in committing those offences for
which hanging is prescribed beforehand as the penalty. These curses
which dominate human life are not the result of the cruelty of the
divine ruler, but of the folly and wickedness of mankind, who, seeing
the better course, yet deliberately choose the worse. The order of the
world is overthrown by the iniquities of men; it is we who have provoked
the exercise of the divine justice, and called down the tokens of his
vengeance. The misery and disaster that surround us like a cloak are the
penalty of our crimes and the price of our expiation. As the divine St.
Thomas has said: _Deus est auctor mali quod est poena, non autem mali
quod est culpa._ There is a certain quantity of wrong done over the face
of the world; therefore the great Judge exacts a proportionate quantity
of punishment. The total amount of evil suffered makes nice equation
with the total amount of evil done; the extent of human suffering
tallies precisely with the extent of human guilt. Of course you must
take original sin into account, 'which explains all, and without which
you can explain nothing.' 'In virtue of this primitive degradation we
are subject to all sorts of physical sufferings _in general_; just as in
virtue of this same degradation we are subject to all sorts of vices _in
general_. This original malady therefore [which is the correlative of
original sin] has no other name. It is only the capacity of suffering
all evils, as original sin is only the capacity of committing all
crimes.'[6] Hence all calamity is either the punishment of sins actually
committed by the sufferers, or else it is the general penalty exacted
for general sinfulness. Sometimes an innocent being is stricken, and a
guilty being appears to escape. But is it not the same in the
transactions of earthly tribunals? And yet we do not say that they are
conducted without regard to justice and righteousness. 'When God
punishes any society for the crimes that it has committed, he does
justice as we do justice ourselves in these sorts of circumstance. A
city revolts; it massacres the representatives of the sovereign; it
shuts its gates against him; it defends itself against his arms; it is
taken. The prince has it dismantled and deprived of all its privileges;
nobody will find fault with this decision on the ground that there are
innocent persons shut up in the c