Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
“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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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