Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845

eaven and earth, rich and poor, equally denounce. On the other hand, his guilt will bring him almost immediately before the tribunal of God, as well as the judgment-seat of man. No long interval weakens the impression, no long space holds out the vague prospect of repentance and amendment, and compensatory acts of goodness; but if he will lift the knife, if he will mingle the poison, there is the earthly executioner at hand to transfer him to the still more dreadful sentence of the after-world! The same opinion which condemns the crime of murder here on earth, as the most atrocious that can be committed, follows him to that other tribunal; and all that his imagination has been accustomed to depict of the horrors of internal and eternal punishment, rushes at once upon him.

When the temptation comes in the shape of sudden anger and impetuous passion, there is a threat as sudden to encounter it. When the crime is revolved in the secret and guilty recesses of the mind--as when some individual stands betwee