The six last commandments treat of the rights of man and condemn injustice.  We are told to respect the life, the virtue, the goods and the reputation of our fellow-men; we are commanded to do so not only in act, but also in thought and desire.  Life is protected by the fifth, virtue by the sixth and ninth, property by the seventh and tenth, and reputation by the eighth.  To sin against any of these commandments is to sin against justice in one form or another.

The claims, however, of violated justice are not such as to exact the impossible in order to repair an injury done.  A dead man cannot be brought back to life, a penniless thief cannot make restitution unless he steals from somebody else, etc., etc.  But he who finds himself thus physically incapable of undoing the wrongs committed must have at least the will and intention of so doing:  to revoke such intention would be to commit a fresh sin of injustice.  The alternative is to do penance, either willingly in this life, or forcibly in the purging flames of the suffering Church in the next.  In that way, some time or other, justice, according to the plan of God, will be done; but He will never be satisfied until it is done.

CHAPTER LXVIII.  HOMICIDE.

To kill is to take life, human or animal.  It was once thought by a sect of crazy fanatics, that the Fifth Commandment applied to the killing of animals as well as of men.  When a man slays a man, he slays an equal; when he kills an animal, he kills a creature made to serve him and to be his food; and raw meat is not always palatable, and to cook is to kill.  “Everything that moves and lives,” says Holy Writ, “shall be unto you as food.”

The killing therefore herein question is the taking of human life, or homicide.  There can be no doubt but that life is man’s best and most precious possession, and that he has an inborn right to live as long as nature’s laws operate in his favor.  But man is not master of that gift of life, either in himself or in others.  God, who alone can give, alone may take it away.  Sole master of life, He deals it out to His creatures as it pleases Him; and whoever tampers with human life intrudes upon the domain of the Divinity, violating at the some time the first right of his fellow-man.

We have an instinctive horror of blood, human blood.  For the ordinary individual the Mosaic enactment that forbids murder is almost superfluous, so deeply has nature graven on our hearts the letter of that law.  Murder is abominable, for the very reason that life is precious; and no reasonable being, civilized or savage, dealing death unjustly unto a fellow-man, can have any other conviction in his soul than that he is committing a crime and incurring the almighty wrath of the Deity.  If such killing is done by a responsible agent, and against the right of the victim, the crime committed is murder or unjustifiable homicide.