The Buried Temple | Page 5

but let the misfortune befall our
enemy, and the universe is at once repeopled with invisible judges. If,
however, some unexpected, disproportionate stroke of good fortune
come to us, we are quickly convinced that we must possess merits so
carefully hidden as to have escaped our own observation; and we are
happier in their discovery than at the windfall they have procured us.
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"One has to pay for all things," we say. Yes, in the depths of our heart,
in all that pertains to man, justice exacts payment in the coin of our
personal happiness or sorrow. And without, in the universe that enfolds
us, there is also a reckoning; but here it is a different paymaster who
measures out happiness or sorrow. Other laws obtain; there are other
motives, other methods. It is no longer the justice of the conscience that
presides, but the logic of nature, which cares nothing for our morality.
Within us is a spirit that weighs only intentions; without us, a power

that only balances deeds. We try to persuade ourselves that these two
work hand in hand. But in reality, though the spirit will often glance
towards the power, this last is as completely ignorant of the other's
existence as is the man weighing coals in Northern Europe of the
existence of his fellow weighing diamonds in South Africa. We are
constantly intruding our sense of justice into this non-moral logic; and
herein lies the source of most of our errors.
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And further, what right have we to complain of the indifference of the
universe, what right to declare it incomprehensible, and monstrous?
Why this surprise at an injustice in which we ourselves take so active a
part? It is true that there is no trace of justice to be found in disease,
accident, or most of the hazards of external life, which fall
indiscriminately on the good and the wicked, the hero and traitor, the
poisoner and sister of charity. But we are far too eager to include under
the title "Justice of the Universe" many a flagrant act that is exclusively
human, and infinitely more common and more destructive than disease,
the hurricane, or fire. I do not allude to war; it might be urged that we
attribute this rather to the will of the people or kings than to Nature.
But poverty, for instance, which we still rank with irremediable ills
such as shipwreck or plague; poverty, with all its crushing sorrows and
transmitted degeneration--how often may this be ascribed to the
injustice of the elements, and how often to the injustice of our social
condition, which is the crowning injustice of man? Need we, at the
sight of unmerited wretchedness, look to the skies for a reason, as
though a flash of lightning had caused it? Need we seek an
impenetrable, unfathomable judge? Is this region not our own; are we
not here in the best explored, best known portion of our dominion; and
is it not we who organise misery, we who spread it abroad, as
arbitrarily, from the moral point of view, as fire and disease scatter
destruction or suffering? Is it reasonable that we should wonder at the
sea's indifference to the soul-state of its victims, when we who have a
soul, the pre-eminent organ of justice, pay no heed whatever to the
innocence of the countless thousands whom we ourselves sacrifice,
who are our wretched victims? We choose to regard as beyond our

control, as a force of fatality, a force that rests entirely within our own
hands. But does this excuse us? Truly we are strange lovers of an ideal
justice, we are strange judges! A judicial error sends a thrill of horror
from one end of the world to another; but the error which condemns
three-fourths of mankind to misery, an error as purely human as that of
any tribunal, is attributed by us to some inaccessible, implacable power.
If the child of some honest man we know be born blind, imbecile, or
deformed, we will seek everywhere, even in the darkness of a religion
we have ceased to practise, for some God whose intention to question;
but if the child be born poor--a calamity, as a rule, no less capable than
the gravest infirmity of degrading a creature's destiny--we do not dream
of interrogating the God who is wherever we are, since he is made of
our own desires. Before we demand an ideal judge, we shall do well to
purify our ideas, for whatever blemish there is in these will surely be in
the judge. Before we complain of Nature's indifference, or ask at her
hands an equity she does not possess, let us attack the iniquity that
dwells in the homes of men; and when this has been swept away, we