In the third place, the idea of death is attended by a pain of inferiority of another kind, a pain of ignorance or doubt, joined to which are pains of fear. Is death the end or not? If not, what is to follow after death? * This doubt and the fears which attend it greatly enhance that compound pain, called dread or Horror, with which Death is so commonly regarded.

Finally, in all ages and countries, in which the idea of a future existence has prevailed, that is to say, in almost all, if not all, ages and countries of which we have any knowledge, the conceived possibility, and, in many cases, the conceived probability and even certainty, that such future existence will be an existence of torment, has greatly added to the dread of death.

Mystical views have contributed not a little to enhance these horrors. Mysticism has taught, at least some modifications of it have taught, that death will introduce us, at once, into the sensible presence of an awful, if not an offended Deity; and hence, in all countries in which mystical ideas have prevailed, the conceived necessity of preparations for

*

These thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night

Devoid of sense and motion?"

Paradise Lost, Book II. v. 146.

"Ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life."

Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 1.

death; which conceived necessity has caused sudden, and what is called violent death, to be regarded as something peculiarly dreadful; * though it is evidently the least painful, and, therefore, as far as that goes, the most desirable way of dying.

"

4. Mystical systems of morals have condemned homicide equally with forensic systems; but upon widely different grounds. According to mystical morality, murder is wrong, not because death is an evil to him who suffers it, but because it displeases God to have his creatures killed, his property injured, and his arrangements interfered with; or, as it is commonly expressed, to have men hurried into his presence before he has sent for them.

5. This objection, it is plain, applies to all sorts of killing, killing in battle, killing in execution of a judicial sentence, killing in self-defence, —just as decidedly as to the most unprovoked murder; and hence those mystical moralists who have been consistent, have denounced war, capital punishments, and, since resistance must always tend towards homicide, even resistance to injuries, as displeasing to God, and, therefore, sins. For it should be observed that what, in forensic systems of morals, are denominated Faults and Crimes, in mystical systems of morals, are called Sins. Whatever thought, word,

* Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled;
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O horrible! O horrible! most horrible ! "

Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5.

or deed, is displeasing to God, is sinful. Whatever is not sinful, is pure, holy, just, and right, terms which, in mystical phraseology, are equivalents.

Even suicide, being liable to the same mystical objection above stated, has been denounced by many mystical moralists, under the name of self-murder, as one of the greatest of sins; a denunciation in which all the mystical moralists of the Christian school have united; though many of them, out of deference to forensic morality, have endeavoured to maintain, in the very teeth of their own principles, the lawfulness of war, of capital punishments, and of homicide in self-defence.

6. Forensic morals, though condemning homicide as generally wrong, have yet admitted many cases in which it becomes permissible, and even praiseworthy. Homicide in self-defence has been esteemed permissible for the reason, that benevolence is naturally extinguished and malevolence excited, towards the man who threatens us with the pain of death, or, indeed, with any other grievous pain.

7. Indeed the pain excited by the apprehension of death, produces, in general, such a total extinguishment of the sentiment of benevolence, that to save one's life even by sacrificing the life of an innocent person, as when two drowning men struggle together for a plank, — does not indicate any extraordinary deficiency of moral sentiment, and is, therefore, regarded in many cases as permissible.

8. Even the sentiment of benevolence itself may prompt me to commit homicide, when that homicide is necessary to the protection of those I love, my

parents or children or near relatives or friends or fellow-citizens; and hence homicide under these circumstances, may even assume a praiseworthy character, may be regarded as a beneficial and meritorious act. Homicide in war, and public executions, stand precisely upon this ground.

9. What are called the Laws of War, at least those among them which tend to diminish its horrors, grow, for the most part, out of the sentiment of benevolence. So long as the enemy maintains a threatening aspect and position, my duty towards my family and my country requires me to use my best efforts for his destruction. But when he is humbled, discomforted, subdued, and no longer dangerous, to put him to death would be a pure, gratuitous cruelty.

Some other of these laws of war, such as that, for instance, which forbids the use of poisoned weapons, originated in the peculiar character which war assumed in modern Europe; it having become an occupation and, as it were, a sort of sport and pastime for the nobility; so that the field of battle came to resemble, in some respects, the lists of chivalry. During the wars of the French Revolution, which were wars of feeling, not of amusement, many of these carpet regulations were disregarded or set aside. But though the atrocities of those wars were very much cried out against, they presented no instances of deliberate, unprovoked, cold-blooded cruelty, like the desolation of the Palatinate by the orders of Louis the Fourteenth.

10. In order to understand the strange contradictions of opinion which exist throughout Christen

ac

dom, on the subject of duelling, as well as upon several other points of morals, it is necessary to consider that although the mystical theory of morals cording to which killing in a duel is one of the most aggravated kinds of murder - is preached by all the priests, and is taught in all the schools, yet there has always existed among the upper classes of society a traditional code of forensic morality, called, by way of distinction, the Law of Honor.

This modern code of forensic morals, this Law of Honor, consisted originally of a few maxims and practices common for the most part to all rude and warlike nations, which the conquerors of the Roman Empire brought with them from the woods of Germany. When literature began to dawn once more, the code of honor was gradually improved by maxims derived from the schools of the ancient philosophers, Stoic and Epicurean; and in still later times, it has been refined and purified by the labor of many enlightened men of the world, and of several profound philosophers.

This Law of Honor, this current forensic system of morality, on several points, is directly at war with the Christian mystic code. Persons of the upper classes are taught the mystic code of morals at school and church, and the code of honor at home and in society; and hence results, in many cases, a strange confusion and inconsistency of thought and action. Persons of the lower class, till within a short period, were only instructed in the mystical code, which inculcated obedience, humility, contentedness, and hard labor, as the special duties of that lower class..