The doctrine of retribution - 1885 Author:William Jackson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: fusion of a moral certainty along with a physical condition necessarily uncertain. Moral Truth comes to us as being in its own nature uncompromisingly true. T... more »he " ought" in Morality is as distinct as the " must " in mechanical Nature. The Moral contradictory of Right and Wrong is as absolute as the logical contradictory of True and False. It is no less certain that Right and Wrong can never coincide, than that two parallel lines if produced to infinity will never be made to meet. There are "internal and opposite angles" in the Ethical sphere, wide enough to determine an eternal separation of the two courses infinitely prolonged. In this world, that which we ought to choose, and that which we ought to eschew, are set over against each other. Both are given us as objects of contemplation, together with an internal evidence that both are always to remain apart, always to continue irreconcilable. Why Evil should have been set over against Good at all is (as I have observed) an enigma unsolved. And its solution must wait till we know whether all the stellar systems are inhabited; whether Evil exists in each or all of them ; whether spiritual influences can travel from one stellar system to another, even as light travels ; and whether the present condition of our own small planet is a rule or an exception,—H continuing or a transient shadow. It may be that we now dwell in the lazar-house of the Universe; that our meagre developments and mournful strifes are (so to speak) spectacles to spiritual powers inhigh places. That when our own inward vision becomes from earthly dross refined and clear, we shall see this world's Evil, as a black drop in a translucent ocean. And that, relatively to our individual selves, Good may be a manifest and a final victory; sin effaced by Righteousness; m...« less