question--from approaching the black blood that would for an instant have given them life and speech. We shall go straight to the joy, the regret or remorse, whose counsel we need; or to the act of injustice we wish scrupulously to examine, in order either to make reparation, if such still be possible, or that the sight of the wrong we did, whose victims have ceased to be, is required to give us the indispensable force that shall lift us above the injustice it still lies in us to commit. 9 Yes, even though our past contain crimes that now are beyond the reach of our best endeavours, even then, if we consider the circumstances of time and place, and the vast plane of each human existence, these crimes fade out of our life the moment we feel that no temptation, no power on earth, could ever induce us to commit the like again. The world has not forgiven--there is but little that the external sphere will forget or forgive--and their material effects will continue, for the laws of cause and effect differ from those which govern our consciousness. At the tribunal of our personal justice, however--the only tribunal which has decisive action on our inaccessible life, as it is the only one whose decrees we cannot evade, whose concrete judgments stir us to our very marrow--the evil action that we regard from a loftier plane than that at which it was committed, becomes an action that no longer exists for us save in so far as it may serve in the future to render our fall more difficult; nor has it the right to lift its head again except at the moment when we incline once more towards the abyss it guards.