Now, it may be very commendable to take human life at the bidding of others; but it is not consistent with the unqualified statement that “all human life is sacred.” The one proposition--it is not my concern here to defend or attack either of them--becomes discredited by the other. The advocate of the judicial extinction of life under the institution of capital punishment, or of wholesale extinction under the institution of war--if he wishes to be heard as a credible witness, and to avoid the imputation of discreditable conduct when he gives a hand to it--must reshape his statement something after this manner: “Human life is so important a thing that one man must not take it on his own responsibility; but Society may.” And then he will have to make up his mind what he means by Society, and why he thinks Society is more to be trusted than himself. And if he finds himself in a community which permits or even inculcates moral evils which he individually cannot tolerate, then he must puzzle out for himself why he will trust such a community with the power to kill, when he sees it make so vile and miserable a misuse of the power to keep alive--or to keep from life in any form that is worth having--so many millions of his fellow-creatures. And he will find presently that his assertion that human life is sacred must--if it is to mean anything--extend from the comparatively easy and simple problem of the death-penalty to those far greater problems, which lie all around him, of the cruel life-penalties tolerated or exacted by Society. So before long what he will find himself up against is this--the necessity of being a creditable or a discreditable witness to the value of Society itself--of that thing to whose apron-strings he has tied his conscience. For you cannot assert that it is right for Society to unmake human life unless you also assert that Society is making human life in a form that is worth having, in a form, too, that would be imperilled were its power of judicial murder to be taken from it. But the point of departure I have wished to bring you to is this: man did not begin to doubt his own moral right to kill other men until there entered into his being an idea of something better able than himself to judge, to control, and to provide. And so long as he believed in that idea as protective of a morality superior to his own, and productive of the fruits of life in better quality, he could without discredit put into its hands powers which he dared not himself exercise.