In dealing with crime and the family, modern thought and experience have
thrown no fresh light on the views of Jesus. When Swift had occasion to
illustrate the corruption of our civilization by making a catalogue of
the types of scoundrels it produces, he always gave judges a conspicuous
place alongside of them they judged. And he seems to have done this not
as a restatement of the doctrine of Jesus, but as the outcome of his own
observation and judgment. One of Mr. Gilbert Chesterton's stories
has for its hero a judge who, whilst trying a criminal case, is so
overwhelmed by the absurdity of his position and the wickedness of the
things it forces him to do, that he throws off the ermine there and
then, and goes out into the world to live the life of an honest man
instead of that of a cruel idol. There has also been a propaganda of a
soulless stupidity called Determinism, representing man as a dead
object driven hither and thither by his environment, antecedents,
circumstances, and so forth, which nevertheless does remind us that
there are limits to the number of cubits an individual can add to his
stature morally or physically, and that it is silly as well as cruel to
torment a man five feet high for not being able to pluck fruit that is
within the reach of men of average height. I have known a case of an
unfortunate child being beaten for not being able to tell the time after
receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures on a clock dial, the
fact being that she was short-sighted and could not see them. This is a
typical illustration of the absurdities and cruelties into which we are
led by the counter-stupidity to Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will.
The notion that people can be good if they like, and that you should
give them a powerful additional motive for goodness by tormenting
them when they do evil, would soon reduce itself to absurdity if its
application were not kept within the limits which nature sets to the
self-control of most of us. Nobody supposes that a man with no ear for
music or no mathematical faculty could be compelled on pain of death,
however cruelly inflicted, to hum all the themes of Beethoven's
symphonies or to complete Newton's work on fluxions.