scaffold, every victim—is a monument to its cruelty and blind unreasoning wrath. Whether it was a fire kindled to burn a heretic in Geneva,—a gibbet erected to kill a witch in Salem,—or a scaffold made to put to death an ordinary “criminal,” it has ever been the same,—the punishment of the creature for the creator’s fault. There might be some excuse if man could turn from the frail, cracked vessels, and bring to trial the great potter for the imperfect work of his hand. But we live in the shadows; we can see only the causes and effects that are the closest to our eyes. If the clouds would rise, and the sun shine bright, and our vision reach out into time and space, we might find that these cracked vessels serve as high a purpose in a great, broad scheme, as the finest clay, wrought in the most beautiful and perfect form. The following stanza was born of this philosophy and would inevitably come from the broad, charitable brain that had studied the creeds that told of the cruelty of the great Maker, but whose brain and conscience had not been stunted and warped by their palsying dogmas: Then said a Second—“Ne’er a peevish Boy Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy; And he that with his hand the Vessel made Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.” The cruel religious dogmas, which in Omar’s land and Age, as in our own, blackened both man and his Maker, had no terrors for a soul like his. He could not believe in eternal punishment. The doctrine was a slander, alike to God and man. He felt something of the greatness of a force that could permeate and move the countless worlds, which make up the limitless, unfathomed infinite we call the Universe. He saw in man one of the smallest and most insignificant toys created by this power to serve some unknown end; and he could not believe that the Master-Builder would demand of his imperfect children more than he had furnished them the strength to give. His faith in the justice of man’s case before the great Judge is shown in the following stanza: Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the Road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with Predestin’d Evil round Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin! But even more strongly he presents the case of God against man, and man against God, for all the crimes and miseries and sufferings of the world. It would doubtless be difficult in all the literature of the earth to find a juster, bolder statement of the old question of the responsibility for sin. To some minds, this strong expression may seem like blasphemy, but it is manly and courageous, logical and just. Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake; For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man Is blacken’d—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!