“Unhappy man,” cried Mr. Eden; “turn those perverse eyes from the faults of others to your own danger.  The temptations under which you fell end here; then let their veil fall from your eyes, and you may yet bless those who came between your soul and its everlasting ruin.  Your victims are dead; their eternal fate is fixed by you.  Heaven is more merciful—­it has not struck you dead by your victim’s side; it gives you, the greatest sinner of all, a chance to escape.  Seize that chance.  Waste no time in passion and petulance—­think only of your forfeited soul.  Madman, to your knees!  What! dare you die as you have lived these three years past? dare you die abhorred of Heaven?  Fool! see yourself as every eye on earth and in heaven sees you.  The land contains no criminal so black as you.  Other homicides have struck hastily on provocation or stung by injury, or thrust or drawn by some great passion—­but you have deliberately gnawed away men’s lives.  Others have seen their one victim die, but you have looked on your many victims dying yet not spared them.  Other homicides’ hands are stained, but yours are steeped in blood.  To your knees, MAN-slayer!  I dare not promise you that a life given to penitence and charity will save so foul a soul, but it may, for Heaven’s mercy is infinite.  Seize on that small chance.  Seize it like one who feels Satan clutching him and dragging him down to eternal flames.  Life is short, eternity is close, judgment is sure.  A few short years and you must meet Edward Josephs again before the eternal Judge.  What a tribunal to face, your victims opposite you!  There the long-standing prejudices that save you from a felon’s death here will avail you nothing.  There the quibbles that pass current on earth will be blasted with the lips that dare to utter and the hearts that coin them.  Before Him, who has neither body nor parts, yet created all the forms of matter, vainly will you pretend that you did not slay, because forsooth the weapons with which you struck at life were invisible and not to be comprehended by a vulgar, shallow, sensual, earthly judge.  There, too, the imperfection of human language will yield no leaf of shelter.

“Hope not to shift the weight of guilt upon poor Josephs there.  On earth muddle-heads will call his death and the self-murderer’s by one name of ‘suicide,’ and so dream the two acts were one; but you cannot gull Omniscience with a word—­the wise man’s counter and the money of a fool.  Be not deceived!  As Rosamond took poison in her hand, and drank it with her own lips, and died by her own act, yet died assassinated by her rival—­so died Josephs.  As men taken by pirates at sea, and pricked with cold steel till in despair and pain they fling themselves into the sea—­so died Josephs and his fellows murdered by you.  Be not deceived!  I, a minister of the gospel of mercy—­I, whose character leans toward charity, tell you that if you die impenitent, so surely as the sun shines and the Bible is true, the murder of Edward Josephs and his brothers will damn your soul to the flames of hell forever—­and forever—­and forever!