You may wonder, perhaps, how it is that I am able to recall so vividly the circumstances of an event which happened many years ago. You would cease so to wonder, had you seen, as I have seen, the ghost of your dead self rise up to cry for vengeance against you, and to condemn you before the judgment seat of God, and of your own conscience. For this was my first glimpse of Hell; this was my Day of Judgment. The recording angel of my own indestructible and now God-awakened memory showed me my past life as God saw it, and as it appeared when robbed of the loathsome disguises with which I had so long contrived to hide my own moral nakedness. "Sin looks much more terrible to those who look at it, than to those who do it," says the author of the "Story of an African Farm." "A convict, or a man who drinks, seems something so far off and horrible when we see him, but to himself he seems quite near to us, and like us. We wonder what kind of a creature he is, but he is just we ourselves." It was so indeed that I had thought and wondered. I had read often of "adulterers" and "murderers" in the newspapers, and had thought of them as I thought of lepers or of cannibals, in no way imagining that _my_ youthful escapade could render such words applicable to me. I had accustomed myself to calling my crime "gallantry" in my own thoughts, and I should have regarded one who used harsher language as wanting in delicacy and in breeding; and now I found myself branded as "Murderer" and "Seducer" to all Eternity! "Murderer!" you say. Yes, murderer, for seduction _is_ moral murder; and the man who has thus sinned against a woman is fit only to stand side by side with him who has taken a life. Ay, and his is not seldom the more awful punishment, for God will as surely require the spiritual life at the hands of the seducer, as He will the bodily life at the hand of the murderer. The one thing of all others which added to the unutterable horror of that moment, was the memory of the false and lying excuses with which I had striven to palliate my sin to myself. I remember that such excuses took form and shape, and haunted and tortured me like devils--as indeed they were--of my own begetting. "The relation of the sexes," I had often said when striving to silence an uneasy conscience, "Bah! it is but a yoke of man's imposing. I take the woman I love to live with me, and she and I are shunned as lepers. Yonder is a man who follows the same precedent and from the same motive; and because a priest has murmured a few words of sanction over the contract, he and his partner are fêted and flattered. How can the indulgence of a natural passion which in one set of circumstances is fair and honourable, in another be sinful and foul? Fair is fair, and foul is foul, and no muttering of a man can transform the one into the other."