“The law—” began Mr. Tredgold.
“Oh, the law says it’s a crime, fast enough,” said Wimsey. “But do you honestly think it’s very bad? I know you’d call it a sin, of course, but why is it so very dreadful? It doesn’t do the person any harm, does it?”
“We can’t answer that,” said Mr. Tredgold, “without knowing the ways of God with the soul. In those last weeks or hours of pain and unconsciousness, the soul may be undergoing some necessary part of its pilgrimage on earth. It isn’t our business to cut it short. Who are we to take life and death into our hands?”
“Well, we do it all day, one way and another. Juries—soldiers—doctors—all that. And yet I do feel, somehow, that it isn’t a right thing in this case. And yet, by interfering—finding things out and so on—one may do far worse harm. Start all kinds of things.”
“I think,” said Mr. Tredgold, “that the sin—I won’t use that word—the damage to Society, the wrongness of the thing lies much more in the harm it does the killer than in anything it can do to the person who is killed. Especially, of course, if the killing is to the killer’s own advantage. The consequence you mention—this thing which the sick person wants done—does the other person stand to benefit by it, may I ask?”
“Yes. That’s just it. He—she—they do.”
“That puts it at once on a different plane from just hastening a person’s death out of pity. Sin is in the intention, not the deed. That is the difference between divine law and human law. It is bad for a human being to get to feel that he has any right whatever to dispose of another person’s life to his own advantage. It leads him to think himself above all laws—Society is never safe from the man who has deliberately committed murder with impunity. That is why—or one reason why—God forbids private vengeance.”
“You mean that one murder leads to another.”
“Very often. In any case it leads to a readiness to commit others.”
“It has. That’s the trouble. But it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t started trying to find things out. Ought I to have left it alone?”