d have power over things to its own individual ends."

Now, this conduct never yet met with any success. You thrust your arm
into the stream to divide the water, but it re-unites behind your hand.
You attempt to live your life on one side only, to dissever that which
was made for unity, and calamity comes to crush you. Men and women
marry for flesh or gold, they put half their whole into the contract,
and their sacrilegious bargain smites them with a curse. It is the law
of compensation, the workings of that moral gravitation which causes
all things to fit into their own places, and is to us the clearest
indication of the workings of the Divine in all this tumultuous life.

Wonderful discernment of the ethical prophet! We cease to see God
omnipresent in all things, and our blindness ends in our destruction.
We see the sensual allurement, but not the sensual hurt; we see the
mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; we think we see our way to
cut off that which we would have from that which we would not have.
"How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence,
that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires,"
quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.

No "last judgment," then, but a first judgment, a judgment here and
now, swift, sudden, irreversible upon every man and woman who dare to
take their lives by halves, to forget the seamless unity wherewith the
universe is woven. This is the ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps
watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies
are the attendants on justice, and if the sun in the heavens should
transgress his path, they would punish him.

This is that awful yet sublime doctrine of retribution which is the
groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the
inspiration without which the world would never have known the
Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine
which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, "their
heads tied together," and Hegel define it as "the other half of sin,"
while Emerson shows that "crime and punishment grow out of one stem.
Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of
pleasure which concealed it." They are linked together inexorably, as
cause and effect, and no god can dispense in this law, because the law
itself is God.

Hence, there can be no such thing as "forgiveness of sin". An act once
done is irr