 and it could be replied to you, that even to the wretched outcry
of the thief on the tree, the wisest and the best of all teachers we know of,
the untiring Comforter and Consoler, promised a pitiful hearing and a certain
hope. Hymns of saints! odes of poets! who are we to measure the chances and
opportunities, the means of doing, or even judging, right and wrong, awarded to
men; and to establish the rule for meting out their punishments and rewards? We
are as insolent and unthinking in judging of men's morals as of their
intellects. We admire this man as being a great philosopher, and set down the
other as a dullard, not knowing either, or the amount of truth in either, or
being certain of the truth anywhere. We sing Te Deum for this hero who has won a
battle, and De Profundis for that other one who has broken out of prison, and
has been caught afterwards by the policeman. Our measure of rewards and
punishments is most partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly
worldly; and we wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and
awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent party
verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rods to
measure Heaven immeasurable - as if, in comparison to that, Newton's mind, or
Pascal's, or Shakespeare's, was any loftier than mine; as if the ray which
travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots.
Measured by that altitude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike
diminutive and pitifully base, that I say we should take no count of the
calculation, and it is a meanness to reckon the difference.«
    »Your figure fails there, Arthur,« said the other, better pleased; »if even
by common arithmetic we can multiply as we can reduce almost infinitely, the
Great Reckoner must take count of all; and the small is not small, or the great
great, to His infinity.«
    »I don't call those calculations in question,« Arthur said; »I, only say
that yours are incomplete and premature - false in consequence, and, by every
operation, multiplying into wider error. I do not condemn the men who murdered
Socrates and damned Galileo. I say that they damned Galileo and murdered
Socrates.«
    »And yet but a moment since you admitted the propriety of acquiescence in
the present, and, I suppose, all other tyrannies?«
    »
