The Struggle for Law
high above all his enemies who finally triumph over him; by his high esteem for the law, his faith in its sacredness, the energy of his genuine, healthy feeling of legal right. The tragedy of his fate lies in this that his ruin was brought about by the superiority and nobility of his nature, his lofty feeling of legal right, and his heroic devotion to the idea of law, which made him oblivious to all else and ready to sacrifice everything for it, in contact with the miserable world of the time in which the arrogance of the great and the powerful was equaled only by the venality and cowardice of the judges. The crimes which he committed fall much more heavily on the prince, his functionaries and his judges, who forced him out of the way of the law into the way of lawlessness. For no wrong which man has to endure, no matter how grievous, can at all compare, at least in the eyes of ingenuous moral feeling, with that which the authority established by God commits when it itself violates the law. Judicial murder is the deadly sin of the law. The guardian and
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