The league between virtue and nature engages all things to
assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of
the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are
arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world
to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground,
such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and
squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot
wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to
leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires.
The laws and substances of nature -- water, snow, wind, gravitation
-- become penalties to the thief.
On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all
right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is
mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic
equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns
every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm;
but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached,
cast down their colors and from enemies became friends, so disasters
of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors[.]