THE EQUINOX
great Catholic Count Joseph de Maistre so well understood ;
this is why the penalty of death is a natural right, and will never
disappear from human laws. The stain of murder would be
indelible if God did not justify the scaffold ; the divine power,
abdicated by society and usurped by criminals, would belong
to them without dispute. Assassination would then become
a virtue when it exercised the reprisals of outraged nature.
Private vengeance would protest against the absence of public
expiation, and from the splinters of the broken sword of
justice anarchy would forge its daggers.
“Tf God did away with Hell, men would make another in
order to defy Him,” said a good priest to us one day. He
was right: and it is for that reason that Hell is so anxious
to be done away with. Emancipation! is the cry of every
vice. Emancipation of murder by the abolition of the pain
of death; emancipation of prostitution and infanticide by the
abolition of marriage; emancipation of idleness and rapine by
the abolition of property. . . . So revolves the whirlwind of
perversity until it arrives at this supreme and secret formula:
Emancipation of death by the abolition of life!
It is by the victories of toil that one escapes from the
fatalities of sorrow. What we call death is but the eternal
parturition of Nature. Ceaselessly she re-absorbs and takes
again to her breast all that is not born of the spirit. Matter,
in itself inert, can only exist by virtue of perpetual motion,
and spirit, naturally volatile, can only endure by fixing itself.
Emancipation from the laws of fatality by the free adhesion
of the spirit to the true and good, is what the Gospel calls the
spiritual birth; the re-absorption into the eternal bosom of
Nature is the second death.
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