“Chide not Heaven foolishly! Thou sayest that He has ordained laws to which worlds that thou but faintly seest above, are subject:—that’s true: carry thy reflections still farther. Thou beholdest above thee, with the naked eye, orbs, in regard to which thy powers of calculation are scarcely comprehensive enough to keep pace with thy vision. To thy sight, when assisted, these already uncountable worlds multiply themselves to numbers which thou canst attempt to speak of only in ratios; and, probably, when thy ingenuity shall have contrived to invent some instrument that will assist thy vision still more, thou shalt behold, open before thee, an immensity of orb-filled space, at the sight of which despair will well-nigh seize thee. Consider all these,—even the few that thou seest without unusual exertion,—they all exist, move, and revolve by the force of laws which are impressed upon them. Contemplate their mechanism and order. Take this one—it is the centre of a system, and stands the governor, amidst millions of other orbs that are subject and obedient to its guidance. It moves, and they move, too, with and around it; and it is itself subject to some other, from which it receives its motion and its law. Those others, too, that so humbly seem to follow it, are, each of them in its place, the rulers of others again, that are less powerful than themselves, and give their law to them. Each of these, apparently, disjointed parts, and these numerous groups of world-contained worlds, are united and cemented, under the all-powerful force of law, and form a whole that is more incomprehensible at the ratio of the unit of each, than its component parts. Still, notwithstanding this unrealizable immensity, behold the harmony and regularity with which they perform their revolutions. In these gyrations, that are as innumerable as themselves, not one clashes against the other; and when they diverge the distance of even a cubic inch, such divergence is ever exacted by the necessity of the self-same law, which so marvellously controls them. In the movements of these vast bodies time can be calculated to the utmost second; and in their inclination to a given point, towards which they have been verging for millions of your computed years, not a difference, except that which the known law seemed to require, can be traced, either in ratio, or in, what appears to your short-lived eyes, their remarkable slowness. Here mark law, and obedience to that law.
“From the sublime regions come now to earth. Thou mayest behold design and intelligence in the very inorganic matter that composes it, from the consolidated and hardened granite that resists and beats back the rushing ocean, to the minute particle that blinds thee by the roadside. Law is stamped upon them, and adherence to that law, composes their very existence. Again, the trees which shelter this beautiful globe tell, in their germination, their bloom, their blossom, and decay, of law and obedience.
“Proceed to organized things;—contemplate all living creatures, from the low and torpid lizard that creeps upon the tombstone, and turns its cold and clammy sides to the sunbeams, to the gigantic elephant—thou wilt find that every animal carries in itself a law and undergoes the pains of retribution whenever it violates that law. Thus the browsing sheep that forgets its instinct, and feeds on poisonous herbs, dies. The scorpion, that turns his sting upon itself, also dies. The antelope, if it throws itself down a rock must necessarily be dashed to pieces. In all these things you see law, and its safeguard—retribution. Man, as well as all other beings, is subject to it, and the penalty which its violation entails. If you establish false systems among yourselves, and consent to postpone to an imaginary period, this penalty, which ought to be made to follow closely upon every violation of the law, surely Heaven is not to be blamed. Duty is poised between the reward of virtue and retribution:—man has the license to choose, between either meriting the former, or bringing down the latter, upon himself. The great error of your social physics is, that you remit this penalty to a period of time, which if it were even unimagined, would fail to afford the principal and best effect of retribution,—the deterring from crimes.
“Like those who dwelt on the banks of the Nile of old, who built cities for dead men, and gave them kings, and made laws for them, and established vast prisons and instituted judges, and sketched out places which the most fevered imagination cannot realize, and surrounded them with pleasures, or filled them with horrors, either as happy regions where virtues were to be rewarded, or frightful holes in which crimes were to be punished, you permit the evil-doer to live his wicked years, and sink amidst the weeping sorrow of friends or bribed strangers into the quiet grave, then read the lesson to mystified listeners—that evil deeds are punished. If the wretch, who poisoned the life of that miserable creature whom thou but now didst rescue, were made to suffer the one-hundredth part of that misery which he has caused; his mates in vile wickedness, appalled by the example, would shrink in trembling fear from the perpetration of like crimes. You forget, in your social system, the wisdom of the race which you affect to despise, while you cherish the theological philosophy which you were eager to borrow from them, and tie the hand of the avenger, and blunt the double-edged sword of retribution. You punish the man who takes away the life of another; who consigns another to the oblivion on which neither misery nor pleasure intrudes, and him who makes the life of the living worse than death, you permit to roam, in his foulness, this beautiful earth, and only hope that the retribution which you yourselves ought to bring about, will be wrought by the very hand of the Being who operates here but by his created agents. And then, thou short-sighted, impulse-ridden, and reason-limited mortal, complainest in loud and senseless terms against Heaven, while at thy own door lies the wrong. Know that man himself, by law, is the avenger, the retributionist on himself or others.
“‘Ah! is it so?’ I said. I reflected, and found that it must be so.—The scales fell from my eyes.—‘True, true,’ I cried.—Heaven forgive the impulse of a short-sighted mortal.
“Then this man, who may now be rolling in profusion while his child is dying of hunger, ought to be made to bear the stings of famine, too, and suffer the same misery which he has inflicted on others.—And—oh! a fearful light broke in upon me—and the man from whose hands I demanded not existence, but who has given me life, and abandoned me in my misery, ought likewise to feel some part of the sufferings which I undergo. Yes: the only prevention of crime is to make its punishment follow immediately in its course.
“‘Then, hear ye powers above,’ I exclaimed, ‘this miserable life I devote to vindicate the law of nature which has been violated in me, and in your child; and I swear, by the Great Being who gave me reason, that I shall not rest until I have taught my father, that the creature to whom he has given life possesses feelings and sensibility, and is capable of taking vengeance.’
“I resolved, at once, to start for the West Indies, and to go to the docks, as soon as it was light, to procure a ship. So, on the impulse of the thought, I proceeded to the place where I had my lowly lodging to fetch my telescope. But, although I knocked loud enough to awake the soundest sleepers, the door was not opened; I, therefore, sat on the steps until daylight came. When morning had dawned I again knocked, but was refused admittance. ‘Then give me my telescope,’ I prayed. The telescope had been sold the night before for my rent, I was told. I was overwhelmed. It was natural enough the master of the house should require his money, but I never could have contemplated that my telescope would have been taken from me. Rallying from the shock that I had received, I begged to see the master. After some time he came to the door. He was a fat heavy little man, whose voice came whizzingly from his encumbered chest. I implored him to restore me my telescope, telling him that it was my only companion and solace in life, and I offered to work for him in whatever capacity, how mean soever it might be, for the few shillings that were due to him, provided he would give me back my telescope. ‘Go along with you,’ he answered, ‘do you take me for a fool?’ and shut the door violently in my face. I turned away, and was so dejected in mind and wasted in body, that I could not walk. The morning advanced, and the street began to present the busy scene by which it was every day animated. My musings imperceptibly turned on the motly crowd before me. I contemplated the scene in which there might be observed the shrewd cabman driving to death his jaded horse, the affluent man of business, hurrying with inclining head to the pursuit of greater wealth, the afflicted widow, moving along in modest grief; the age-stricken and poor cripple crawling in his sordid rags, and the man of fortune with his air of self-satisfaction, his dangling jewels and his gaudy equipage. I remarked that these different persons passed each other as if no kindly word or salutation had ever rested on their heavy tongues—like gruff animals that hurry in silence to their separate lairs. Each seemed intent on his own pursuit. The driver did not withdraw his attention from his horse’s head, nor did the lordling stop to succour the decaying wretch; the man of business did not raise his eyes from the ground, on which he seemed to count his gains, to notice the sorrowful widow: yet these men possess wealth enough to render thousands happy without injuring themselves.
“They have wealth enough to have my telescope restored to me, and cause my happiness; still, yon wretched being may—nay, will probably sink into his grave for the want of a brass penny from any of these, and I—I should probably be handed over to the police officer, were I to make one more effort for my telescope. ‘Mankind, farewell!’ I exclaimed, from the force of my disgust, ‘I may pity you, but never can love you.’
“I then walked down to the London Docks where, after some inquiry, I found a ship prepared for a voyage to Jamaica. I offered myself to the commander as a seaman. He began to depreciate my capabilities, and said that I should, probably, encumber others rather than be of any service.