more commonplace events.  A peaceable population, menaced in its most sacred rights, has taken up arms in the simplest and most legitimate self-defence.  I do not allow my thoughts to rest upon the soldiers who are advancing to oppress it—­mere instruments as they are in the hands of their leaders—­but upon the leaders themselves.  One of these, without the least necessity, with a calculating coolness, to which he sacrifices all the feelings of a man, or under the sway of one of those ferocious instincts which at times gain the mastery over the soul, gives up a town, a village, to all the horrors of slaughter, pillage, and fire.  The blood of the victims will scarcely, perhaps, have grown cold, the last gleams of the fire will not yet be extinct, when this man shall be receiving the praises of his superiors.  Men will laud the bravery and daring of his exploit; his sovereign will place upon his breast a brilliant cross, the august sign of the world’s redemption; he will return to his country amidst the acclamations of the multitude, and drink in with delight the shouts of triumph which greet him as he moves on his way.  For such things as these, is there to be no penalty but troublesome recollections which may sometimes be banished, and a few timid protests soon hushed by the loud voice of success?  Verily there are perpetrated beneath the sun acts which cry aloud for vengeance.  Have you never felt it—­that mighty cry—­rising from your own bosom, at the sight of some odious crime, or on reading such and such a page of history?  And it must be so; it must be that the cry for vengeance will rise, until the soul has learnt to transform imprecation into prayer, and the desire for justice into supplication for the guilty.  But if, in the presence of crime, we were forced to believe that there will never be either vengeance or pardon, the mainspring of the moral life would be broken, and humanity would at length exclaim, like Brutus in the plains of Philippi:—­“Virtue! thou art but a name!”

The conscience is a reality; but its voice is troublesome, and the captious arguments which go to deny its value find support in the evil tendencies of our nature.  If it has no faith in eternal justice it runs the risk of being blunted by contact with the world.  So doubt takes place, doubt still deeper and more agonizing than that which bears upon the processes of the understanding.  The questions which arise are such as these:—­“This voice of duty—­whence comes it? and what would it have?  May not conscience be a prejudice, the result of education and of habit?  It has little power, it seems, for it is braved with impunity.  Many say that it is a factitious power from which one comes at last to deliver one’s self by resisting it.  Am I not the dupe of an illusion?  I am losing joys which others allow themselves.  Barriers encompass me on every hand, for there are for me prohibited actions, unwholesome beauties, culpable feelings.  Others are free, and make a larger use of life in