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HESPERIA DISCOURSES.
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the earth would have been submerged and poisoned long ages ago.

"If men and women in the body would but learn to help us, the atmosphere would become clear, as it will be in time. But they send out their murderers, red-handed and full of hatred to swell the ranks of degraded spirits who will not rise or work as we have to do, but instead try to retard us as long as possible, and these are the spirits that men call back with all their vicious desires and gives house-room to. While they have the murderer still in his prison of flesh, he cannot reach them nor influence them so strongly as when they set him at liberty to develop his fell strength. The law of a life for a life and blood for blood is the creed of the savage and the ignorant, and can only add to the rapacious ranks of Murder, for whereas they had him shut out from his fellows before, they open the prison doors and bid him go forth free and unseen to skulk about the earth and take possession of other brains. Have you not observed that after each execution there spreads an epidemic of the same species of crime?

"Blood does not call for blood. The victim, unless vicious himself, has no desire for vengeance on his slayer, for he has no sense of wrong to revenge. He has merely been set at liberty. Sometimes, as in your case, without knowledge of pain, yet, even if with torture, that is forgotten as quickly as the mother forgets the agonies of travail in the joys of this great possession, freedom and real life.

"The murderer, like the robber, seducer and liar, only injures himself by his crimes while in the body, yet sent out with his hatreds and lusts upon him, he becomes like a cageless wild beast, and riots wholesale amongst the