‘Your common creed, when it talks rightly of God as one “who has no passions,” ought to make you speak more reverently of the possibility of any act of ours disturbing the everlasting equanimity of the absolute Love. Why will men so often impute to God the miseries which they bring upon themselves?’
‘Because, I suppose, their pride makes them more willing to confess themselves sinners than fools.’
‘Right, my friend; they will not remember that it is of “their pleasant vices that God makes whips to scourge them.” Oh, I at least have felt the deep wisdom of that saying of Wilhelm Meister’s harper, that it is
“Voices from the depth of Nature borne
Which woe upon the guilty head proclaim.”
Of nature—of those eternal laws of hers which we daily break. Yes! it is not because God’s temper changes, but because God’s universe is unchangeable, that such as I, such as your poor father, having sown the wind, must reap the whirlwind. I have fed my self-esteem with luxuries and not with virtue, and, losing them, have nothing left. He has sold himself to a system which is its own punishment. And yet the last place in which he will look for the cause of his misery is in that very money-mongering to which he now clings as frantically as ever. But so it is throughout the world. Only look down over that bridge-parapet, at that huge black-mouthed sewer, vomiting its pestilential riches across the mud. There it runs, and will run, hurrying to the sea vast stores of wealth, elaborated by Nature’s chemistry into the ready materials of food; which proclaim, too, by their own foul smell, God’s will that they should be buried out of sight in the fruitful all-regenerating grave of earth: there it runs, turning them all into the seeds of pestilence, filth, and drunkenness.—And then, when it obeys the laws which we despise, and the pestilence is come at last, men will pray against it, and confess it to be “a judgment for their sins;” but if you ask what sin, people will talk about “les voiles d’airain,” as Fourier says, and tell you that it is presumptuous to pry into God’s secret counsels, unless, perhaps, some fanatic should inform you that the cholera has been drawn down on the poor by the endowment of Maynooth by the rich.’
‘It is most fearful, indeed, to think that these diseases should be confined to the poor—that a man should be exposed to cholera, typhus, and a host of attendant diseases, simply because he is born into the world an artisan; while the rich, by the mere fact of money, are exempt from such curses, except when they come in contact with those whom they call on Sunday “their brethren,” and on week days the “masses.”
‘Thank Heaven that you do see that,—that in a country calling itself civilised and Christian, pestilence should be the peculiar heritage of the poor! It is past all comment.’
‘And yet are not these pestilences a judgment, even on them, for their dirt and profligacy?’
‘And how should they be clean without water? And how can you wonder if their appetites, sickened with filth and self-disgust, crave after the gin-shop for temporary strength, and then for temporary forgetfulness? Every London doctor knows that I speak the truth; would that every London preacher would tell that truth from his pulpit!’
‘Then would you too say, that God punishes one class for the sins of another?’