those duties which he owes to his friends, and to society. This, and the preceding case, are very apt to be confounded together; and, indeed, they run into each other by insensible degrees. If, however, the evil from which refuge be sought by a voluntary death bears the character of disgrace and degradation, as in the cases of Lucretia and of Cato, it is considered lawful to escape it by suicide ; and the courage, contempt of life, and acute sensibility to dishonor, of which suicide, under such circumstances, is a proof, secure approbation, admiration, and applause.. Thirdly. A man may sacrifice his life for the sake of rendering a benefit to others, induced thereto by the joint influence of benevolence, and of the desire of superiority. Such a sacrifice of life is placed in the highest rank of merit. Even the mystics admit this. Fourthly. A man is held bound to sacrifice his life, or at least to risk it, in defence of his family and his country; because the ordinary force of moral sentiment is sufficient to produce that line of conduct. Even the mystical moralists, with all their horror of suicide, agree that men are bound to sacrifice their lives in the cause of God; though they are very little agreed among themselves, as to what the cause of God is. 13. Mystical morality settles the question of tyrannicide in two opposite ways. Apart from the general guilt of homicide, it is, say the mystics, the duty of men to submit quietly to the tyrant whom God has placed over them. But if that tyrant is also the en emy of God, that alters the case; and there are not wanting good mystical Christian authorities, both Protestant and Catholic,* for putting such tyrants to death. As the priesthood, however, have fallen more and more into subserviency to the civil power, the former view of this question has more and more prevailed. Forensic moralists may entertain doubts, whether the secondary evils of tyrannicide are not more than sufficient to counterbalance its immediate advantages; and they may hesitate, therefore, whether to class it among wrong, permissible, or praiseworthy actions. But the moral character of particular actors depends upon their particular motives; and few doubt as to the moral character, in other words, as to the disinterestedness and good intentions of Brutus, or Charlotte Corday. 14. In all countries in which there is no regular administration of justice, it is deemed a duty to one's murdered relations to avenge their death by the death of the murderer. Where law is established, the relations of the murdered party are held bound to be content with legal punishment. In defect of law, there is no doubt a certain utility resulting to society from private revenge; but this utility is something too distant, and requires for its discovery too great an effort of the reasoning faculties, to have been very distinctly perceived in many communities, in which private revenge is es * Namely, Bellarmine, Suarez, Mariana, Buchanan, &c. See Ranke's "History of the Popes," Book VI. § I. teemed a duty. That idea of duty has reference principally to the murdered party; and rests mainly upon superstitious opinions. It is imagined that the murdered man cannot sleep quietly in his grave, till his murder be avenged.* The same pains of malevolence, of inferiority, and, indeed, of all other kinds, are ascribed to him dead, which he was capable of experiencing while living; and the sentiment of benevolence prompts to the relief of those pains, or at least some of them, by inflicting pains upon the object of his conceived malevolence. Malevolence against the man who has deprived us of a friend, impels in the same direction; and under this double impulse, there arises, in all barbarous states of society, states of society, that is, in which laws have yet no established existence, a tendency towards revenge which laws when they come to be established, often find great difficulty in subduing. 15. In societies somewhat more advanced but still barbarous, and in which the laws, or their administration is so imperfect as to inflict no punishment at all, or no adequate punishment, upon a great variety of private injuries, it is esteemed permissible, and even in some cases a duty, for the injured individual to inflict punishment, and in some cases, even capital punishment, upon the offender. This idea of duty plainly originates in the perception of the utility of punishments to society at large. It i sesteemed both a man's right and his duty, to destroy a dangerous human creature who has assailed his person, * This idea plays a great part in the tragedy of “ Hamlet.” or intruded into his household with criminal intentions, or inflicted some serious injury upon him, and who is likely to do similar injuries to others; just as it would be both his right and his duty to destroy a wild beast, under like circumstances. 16. In such a state of society to volunteer to revenge the injuries of those, who are unable to be their own avengers, is esteemed a beneficial and meritorious act; and hence, in the barbarous times of the Middle Ages, the origin of the idea of knightserrant, celebrated in the Romances, who were supposed to have gone about revenging the wrongs of Traces of the same ideas the weak and innocent.* are to be found in the Greek legends of Hercules and Theseus. It was this very view of matters, which secured for the Regulators, who figured in the early colonial history of some of the American States, and which secures to the executors of Lynch Law, in the present day, a certain degree of public approbation. They are regarded as supplementary to the laws, as the avengers of crimes which the laws cannot, or do not, reach. 17. The practice of duelling sprang, as we have seen, out of this practice of private revenge, justified and made necessary by the defects of the laws. It owed its absurdity of giving the aggressor a chance * The institution of knighthood, and the vows which the knights took exhibiting a strange intermixture of feudal and mystical notions created some foundation in fact, for the fictions of the Ro mances. to add homicide to his previous injury, — in which respect alone it differs from the practice of assassination, and in consequence of which absurdity alone it has been able to maintain itself so long among civilized and polite nations, to a notion derived from the mystical doctrine, that God, who directs all things, will certainly give the victory to that party who deserves it. This idea had, at one time, such a prevalence throughout Europe, that trials by combat and by ordeal became established expedients of the tribunals of justice. Several of the existing rules of duelling were originally rules of court. Thus it appears that the mystics contributed largely to the introduction of duelling; a practice, which, in later times, they have exerted themselves in vain to put an end to. The gradual abandonment of the practice of duelling has been produced, not by the arguing or preaching of the mystics, but by the advancing humanity of the age, and the enlightened reasoning of forensic moralists. 18. In all those countries in which a tolerably complete triumph of law has been established, retaliatory homicide is no longer permitted. That which was useful until a better substitute had been provided, after the provision of that substitute, becomes pernicious. Still, all codes of forensic morals considering the effect of injuries received to diminish the ordinary force of the sentiment of benevolence, and even to give a preponderancy to the sentiment of malevolence, look upon provocation as diminishing, in a proportional extent, the moral guilt of homicide, |