Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/292
quired to be appeased, that it could not be so without the shedding of blood, that one victim could atone for the sins of all, and that the victim who was to effect the work of redemption must be innocent. They were right in all these points, for they simply implicitly affirmed the great Catholic dogmas. Their only mistake was that of supposing that there could exist a man so innocent and just, as to be an efficacious offering of expiation for the sins of the people as a Redeemer. This one error, this one act of forgetfulness of a Catholic dogma, converted the world into a sea of blood, and would of itself have been sufficient to prevent the advent of all true civilization. A ferocious and cruel barbarism is the legitimate and inevitable consequence of the forgetfulness of any Christian dogma, whatever it may be.
The error we have just indicated only consisted in one thing, and as regarded under a certain point of view. The blood of man cannot expiate original sin, which is the sin of the species, the supreme human sin: but it nevertheless may, and does, expiate certain individual crimes, from which follows not only the legitimacy, but also the necessity and propriety of the penalty of death.
The universality of this institution testifies to the universality of the belief of mankind in the purifying efficacy of blood, when shed under certain circumstances, and in its explatory virtue when it is thus shed. Sine sanguine non fit remissio.[1] Mankind could never have extinguished the common debt which it contracted in Adam without the blood shed by the Redeemer. Whereever a people have attempted to abolish the death pen-
- ↑ Heb. ix. 22.