rrow. No
speed of advancing destruction can equalize Agamemnon and
Thersites, Mansfield and Jeffries, or hustle together justice and
fraud, cowardice and valor, purity and corruption, so that they
will interchange qualities. There is an eternal and immutable
morality, as whiteness is white, and blackness is black, and
triangularity is triangular. And no severance of temporal ties or
compression of spatial limits can ever cut the condign bonds of
duty and annihilate the essential distinctions of good and evil,
magnanimity and meanness, faithfulness and treachery.

Reducing our destiny from endless to definite cannot alter the
inherent rightfulness and superiority of the claims of virtue. The
most it can do is to lessen the strength of the motive, to give
the great motor nerve of our moral life a perceptible stroke of
palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral
law? Richter reasons as follows: "Suppose a statue besouled for
two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob
it of one day's life, would you be guilty of murder? One can
injure only an immortal." 9 The sophistry appears when we rectify
the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an
immortal being. In fact, it would appear to be a greater wrong and
injury, for the time, to destroy one day's life of a man whose
entire existence was confined to two days, than it would be to
take away the same period from the bodily existence of one who
immediately thereupon passes into a more exalted and eternal life.
To the sufferer, the former would seem an immitigable calamity,
the latter a benign furtherance; while, in the agent, the overt
act is the same. This general moral problem has been more
accurately answered by Isaac Taylor, whose lucid statement is as
follows: "The creatures of a summer's day might be imagined, when

7 OEuvres Completes, tome xiii.: Immortalite de l'Ame.

8 Sermons of Theism, Sermon VII.

9 Werke, band xxxiii. s. 240.

they stand upon the threshold of their term of existence, to make
inquiry concerning the attributes of the Creator and the rules of
his government; for these are to be the law of their season of
life and the measure of their enjoyments. The sons of immortality
would put the same questions with an intensity the greater from
the greater stake."

Practically, the acknowledged authority of the moral law in human
society cannot be destroyed. Its influence may be unlimitedly