My unfortunate philanthropic friends, it is this long-continued
oblivion of the soul of law that has reduced the Criminal
Question to such a pass among us. Many other things have come,
and are coming, for the same sad reason, to a pass! Not the
supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at; but, in an uncertain
fitful manner, at the inferior or lowest scoundrel, who robs
shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger. How can
Parliament get through the Criminal Question? Parliament,
oblivious of Heavenly Law, will find itself in hopeless _reductio
ad absurdum_ in regard to innumerable other questions,--in regard
to all questions whatsoever by and by. There will be no
existence possible for Parliament on these current terms.
Parliament, in its law-makings, must really try to attain some
vision again of what Heaven's Laws are. A thing not easy to do;
a thing requiring sad sincerity of heart, reverence, pious
earnestness, valiant manful wisdom;--qualities not overabundant
in Parliament just now, nor out of it, I fear.

Adieu, my friends. My anger against you is gone; my sad
reflections on you, and on the depths to which you and I and all
of us are sunk in these strange times, are not to be uttered at
present. You would have saved the Sarawak Pirates, then? The
Almighty Maker is wroth that the Sarawak cut-throats, with their
poisoned spears, are away? What must his wrath be that the
thirty thousand Needlewomen are still here, and the question of
"prevenient grace" not yet settled! O my friends, in sad
earnest, sad and deadly earnest, there much needs that God would
mend all this, and that we should help him to mend it!--And
don't you think, for one thing, "Farmer Hodge's horses" in the