Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/133

 viewless chief of all existence; and as it happens that every particle and atom has life, and force, and power, and destiny, in exact ratio with the subtlety and fineness of itself, it follows that any aggregation thereof must also have a determinate destiny by reason of the size, shape, fineness, etc., of the constituent atoms, and so Joe and Bill, as chemical existences, act just as their organizations vote they shall, acting in concert with the tremendous concourse of eternal forces that forever play upon them in myriad ways, alternately changing the vanishing and accreting quantities and tendencies. God to-day, devil yesterday, a mixture of both to-morrow, resulting in crystallizing all that is good and purging away the bad, whether physical, mental, or moral, for as God is the spirit of push, he pushes all to the better ends, and as speedily as possible gets us out of the cellars of life into its drawing-rooms and parlors.

Unquestionably, our organizations determine the grooves we move in, and no thought, act, or deed, but is the only possible result of the combined gale of influences that blows upon us from the cradle to the grave. We hold that there are two auras or effluences born with us, the nature of which depends upon the preponderance of good or evil that has obtained all along the back line of ancestry at the front of which we individually stand. If the good or smooth prevail, so it will be with us on the troublesome journey called life; and conversely, if ill prevail.

No judge or jury that ever tried a victim for his liberty or life, was or is competent to tell how far a man is responsible for any given deed; for he may have done it as a sort of blister-proxy, — slumbering yet gathering force for long periods, and breaking out in any given moment of our lives, when chemical or other states were exactly right for that sort of development; hence present prison codes are a humbug, law courts a solemn farce, justice a tragedy, the gallows an infamous ulcer on the body politic, a blunder; and this partly because we beget bodies, but God makes souls, and if by folly we build bad tenements, what wonder that the tenants often grow irksome, and raise hell where heaven ought to reign?

We are not free-willites; we are powerless to correct the organic faults of ourselves, but can by loving living do much toward a better state of things for our posterity.