If you have maliciously burnt his house down,
you bring him the price of the house and furniture, together with
further payment for the fright and for the inconvenience of being, for
the present, houseless. You may do all that, and yet the moral guilt
of the conflagration may remain upon your soul. But that is no affair
of his: he is not the custodian of the moral law: he is not offended
by your sin, formally viewed as sin: nor has he any function of
punishing you, taking vengeance upon you, or exacting from you
retribution for that. But what if his wife and children have perished,
and you meant them so to perish, in the fire? Your debt of restitution
still lies in the matter which you took away. Of course it is a debt
that cannot be paid. You cannot give back his "pretty chickens and
their dam" whole and alive again. Still your inability to pay one debt
does not make you liable to that creditor for another debt, which is
part of a wholly different account. He is not offended by, nor are you
answerable to him for, your sin in this case any more than in the
former.
5. We may do an _injury_ to an individual, commit a _crime_ against
the State, and _sin_ against God.
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