SCIENCE OF RECTITUDE AS DISTINCT FROM EXPEDIENCE. 131 
duce upon the evildoer’s imagination such effects as the 
operation of human laws sig onally failsto account for. Certain 
well known characters and scenes which, although in some 
measure dramatic fictions, are universally allowed to be 
distinct reflections from a mirror held up to nature, may 
serve to illustrate this remark. A King of Scotland pays a 
visit to the castle of an ambitious noble. The host, tempted 
by the opportunity, and at the same time urged and aided 
by his still more ambitious wife, treacherously assassinates his 
confiding guest, and afterwards causes an intimate com- 
panion, whose prospects render him formidable, to be put to 
death. He lives in an age when human life is counted cheap, 
and when the administration of criminal laws is not such as 
to infuse into the souls of mighty warriors a spirit of salutary 
caution; he is now exalted above all earthly tribunals; and 
he is a man of daring personal courage. But, having done 
exceptional violence to his moral sense by the perpetration 
of atrocious deeds, he has become subject to a terrifying 
impression of guilt, from which he can find no escape, and he 
quails before a corpse-like spectre which his torturing con- 
science persists in conjuring up. The partner of his guilt is 
more resolutely wicked than himself, and her unhallowed 
aspirations have smothered in her breast whatever affections 
of a sympathetic nature might otherwise have held her 
impatience in check, and hindered it from overstepping the 
bounds within which worldly scheming is ordinarily confined. 
But she too becomes eventually a terror to herself, and in 
the breaking down of physical strength under the incessant 
pressure of a restless spirit she is hy pnotised by the all- 
absorbing impression that the bloody deed has left upon her 
hand a stain which nothing can ever wash out. She has 
fearfully lacerated, so to speak, her moral sense, and not 
knowing where to find or how to apply an effectual remedy, 
she dies of the wound. 
But, as regards the possibility of horror arising from the 
mere consciousness of having deviated from rectitude, fiction 
never created or embellished any illustration more instructive 
or more pertinent than may be found in one of the most 
memorable of historical facts. It would be difficult to 
imagine circumstances less favourable to the development of 
a sense of guilt through awe-inspiring experiences of the 
majesty of outward and visible authority than those under 
which Judas Iscariot committed the crime that has rendered 
his name a by-word. An authority which piety and patriot- 
ism alike were accustomed to honour with submissive rever- 
VOR XXL. L 
