In Love's eyes all anger, contempt, and quarrelsomeness are as bad as murder--indeed are incipient murder, stopped short of overt crime through fear. The look, or word, or deed of unkindness, the thought, or wish, or hope that evil may befall another, even the attitude of cold indifference, is murder in the heart. And it is only because we lack the courage to translate wish into will that in such cases we do not do the thing which, if done without our responsibility, by accident or nature, we should rejoice to see accomplished. From a strange and unexpected source there has come the confirmation of this New Testament conception of the prevalence, not to say the universality, of murder. A brilliant but grossly perverse English man of letters was sentenced to imprisonment a few years ago for the foulest crime. From the gaol in which he was confined there came a most realistic description of the last days and final execution within its walls of a lieutenant in the British army, who was condemned for killing a woman whom he loved. The poem has the exaggeration of a perverted and embittered nature; but beneath the exaggeration there is the original truth, which underlies Jesus' identification of murder and hate. After describing the last days of the condemned man, his execution and his burial, the poem concludes as follows:-- "In Reading Gaol by Reading town There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man Eaten by teeth of flame, In a burning winding sheet he lies And his grave has got no name. "And there, till Christ call forth the dead, In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die. "And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word: The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword." Charge up against ourselves as murder the bitter looks, the hateful words, the unkind thoughts, the selfish actions, which have lessened the vitality, diminished the joy, wounded the heart, and murdered the happiness of those whom we ought to love, whom perhaps at times we think we do love, and who can profess to be guiltless? The harboured grudge, the unrepented injury, the offence for which we have not begged pardon, the employer's refusal to "recognise" his employees or their representatives, and treat with them on fair and equal terms, the workman's cultivated attitude of hostility to his employer, are all such flagrant violations of Love that acts of formal piety or public worship on the part of a person who harbours such feelings are an affront.