The Final Cause.
There are one or two considerations connected with the history we have given which, though having something of a philosophical look, are yet sufficiently practical to be appreciated by the ordinary observer of human nature and the ways of God with His creatures. It is doubtful if, from the beginning, the actors in this drama were ever sufficiently understood; if it is not more true to say, that the people, eager to conserve the prestige of man’s dignity, have been inclined, after the manner of purists, to set off exceptions to the general laws of human nature as the foil of some heaven-born exemption from crime. They have uniformly mixed contempt with their hatred of these strange men. They have not thought them entitled to be objects of consideration, far less study. They have represented them as something so far below their kind, that their deeds can no more enter as elements into a lesson than those of maniacs, or of the lower animals, who are exempted from the laws of responsibility, and so they have shewn an inclination to cast them out of the wide province of history; or, if they would allow them to remain within the precincts of annals, they would consign them to the grotesque page of monstra horrenda.
It is no doubt beneficial for man to think well of the good, but it is not advantageous for him to think lightly of the evil potentialities of his nature. We cannot deny that these men and women were sane; and we have higher authority than a wish-born logic or a self-gratifying rhetoric to satisfy us that “the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” The authority is from heaven, and there is no want of verifying examples upon earth; nay, if we abate the “putrid coruscations,” or what have been called “the blue lights of necromancy” that play round these sordid murders, and which are at least nourished by the fancy, we may find every day cases scarcely less cruel and scarcely less sordid,—if we might not even say that it requires some analysis to find the difference in mere turpitude between a man who murders for the money that is about the body and one who slays for that which the body will bring. Then the repetition adds nothing to the atrocity of the individual act, while the premeditation is as signal in the slouching highwayman as in him who wiles the victim to the fatal den. In short, we may make what parade we please of the gradations of atrocity and the shades of our feelings, but we must always come back to the beginning, that there are no degrees of wickedness in those who have renounced God.
Not only, however, were these individuals sane; one among them, and the leader, was intelligent, had wit and humour, could feel the superficial sentiment of a pathetic lyric, and, above all, possessed ingenuity to the extent of inventing a new crime which has gone, with his name, over the world. The women, too, were intelligent and apt; nor has it been said that Mrs Hare did not feel the yearnings of a mother, or that M‘Dougal was false to the affection, however low, which bound her to the tyrant who enslaved her. Even Hare was not a fool—a character inconsistent with a will-power which could govern a woman of his wife’s acknowledged adroitness, and lead, if not rule, a man such as Burke, so that we may say that, so far as regards mere intelligence, the quaternity were a fair enough specimen of the people of their class, in which certain parts of our city abound; while Burke may be safely pronounced as being considerably above the average of uncultivated minds, left as a waste for the culture of the devil. But not only in this aspect were they worthy of study—they were perfect in their moral organisation as embodiments of evil, with no scruples, no misgivings, no backcomings of penitence, no fear of the future, and no remorse for the past. They were not only “clear grits”—they were “crystals.” They were, out of millions, creatures suited to the work they did—the work was suited to them, and they did it with all that concentration of purpose and uniformity of action which proclaim the being under alienation from the Almighty.
In what we here venture to say we have a sufficient apology for disinterring these people and their deeds, as constituting the great lesson, that it is the occasion that tests the man; even as it is true what the proverb says, that a man is never known till he is invested with power. As an abstract aphorism, that proverb has but little influence; it is only when we see it reduced to the concrete that we feel its truth and lay it up in our hearts; and this we are the more ready to do that, while we are well penetrated by that horror which is fear, we are not the less under the influence of that other horror, which is hatred. And here we insist for a distinction which may silence those who indulge in the fancy, that it is not useful or good to pander to an appetite for details which, while they harrow the heart, are yet, by some strange peculiarity in our nature, not without a grim charm calculated to fascinate and yet not to deter. The fault here lies at the door of the chronicler, for it is he who holds the wand, and it requires only the mode of using it to change the appetite into a revulsion, and to make the horror which is hatred paramount for good. It is only man who is false to nature, never nature to herself. Such deeds she exhibits in their true colours, and he who interprets her can only be true to his office when he produces those emotions which she produced in him uncoloured by the lights of a factitious fancy.
We may thus, even without going further, find a final cause in these terrible acts done by creatures made after the image of God. We have no more right to inquire why evil should be made to deter from evil, than to investigate into the origin of evil itself. Enough if we know and experience that the wages of sin is death; but we have here even more to consider. While we can have no doubt that the tragedy of Burke and Hare is calculated to deter not only from that sin which it involves, but from all those lesser ones which follow from the temptations of mammon, we have to recollect that it put an end to a pre-existing evil of gigantic magnitude, and which all the adjurations of a distressed people were not able otherwise to effect. That evil, as we have seen, was body-snatching. No sooner were the murders which the temptations of that practice induced brought to light, than our legislators took to their powers and duties, and righted the nation. They saved the affections of the heart without annulling the aspirations of the intellect, served the purpose of science in its remedial application to physical ills, without desecrating the temple where burned the light of the spirit, and through which these ills are felt.
BALLANTYNE AND COMPANY, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH
POPULAR WORKS
BY
ALEXANDER LEIGHTON,