“With us,” said he, “the penalty of death is an atonement and consequently a reconciliation, not an act of vengeance. All who die by the law of Israel die in the peace of Israel; they partake of peace in death, and they sleep with their fathers. No malediction descends with them into the grave; they abide in the immortality of the House of Jacob. Death is therefore a crowning grace; it is the cure of a poisoned wound by the hot iron. But we do not apply the iron to those who are past cure; we have no jurisdiction over those the extent of whose transgression has cut them off for ever from Israel. Such are as now dead, and it is not therefore for us to shorten the term of their reprobation on earth: they are delivered over to the wrath of God. Man is warranted to wound only that he may heal, and we do not apply remedies to those who are beyond recovery. The father of a family punishes only his children and is content to shut the door against strangers. Those great criminals upon whom our law pronounces no sentence are thereby excommunicated for ever, which is a penalty greater than death.” The explanation of Rabbi Jechiel is admirable and breathes all the patriarchal genius of ancient Israel. Truly the Jews are our fathers in science, and if we—in place of their persecution—had sought to understand them, they would not have been at this day so far alienated from our faith. The above Talmudic tradition shews the Jewish antiquity of belief in the immortality of the soul.[163] What is this reintegration of the guilty in the family of Israel by an expiatory death unless it be a protest against death itself and a sublime act of faith in the perpetuity of life? Comte Joseph de Maistre understood this doctrine well when he raised the executioner’s sanguinary mission into a kind of peculiar priesthood. The anguish of punishment supplicates, said this great writer, and blood in its outpouring still remains a sacrifice. Were capital punishment other than a plenary absolution it would be nothing but retaliation on murder; the man who suffers his sentence fulfils all his penance and enters by death into the immortal society of the children of God.