Righteous Retribution
Francis Jacox. Luke 6:38 Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom… One remembers, of course, the Regent Morton hugged to death by the "maiden" he had been the means of introducing into Scotland. The French doctor, Guillotin, is even now not uncommonly believed to have perished in the Reign of Terror by the instrument invented by and named after him; whereas he quietly died in his bed, many many years later than that. But the Revolution history is well stored with instances like that of Chalier, condemned to death by the criminal tribunal at Lyons — the guillotine which he had sent for from Paris to destroy his enemies being first destined to sever his own head from his body. A bungling executioner prolonged the last agonies of this man, who, in fact, was hacked to death, not decapitated. He tasted slowly, as Lamartine says, of the death, a thirst for which he had so often sought to excite in the people; "he was glutted with blood, but it was his own." Alison recognizes in the death of Murat a memorable instance of the moral retribution which often attends on "great deeds of iniquity, and by the instrumentality of the very acts which appeared to place them beyond its reach," He underwent in 1815 the very fate to which, seven years before, he had consigned a hundred Spaniards at Madrid, guilty of no other crime than that of defending their country; and this, as Sir Archibald adds, "by the application of a law to his own case which he himself had introduced to check the attempt of the Bourbons to regain a throne which he had usurped." (Francis Jacox.) Parallel Verses KJV: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. WEB: "Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be given to you. For with the same measure you measure it will be measured back to you."