heart among Christians--the sayings about turning the other cheek and
the rest--are given by our Lord as explanations of the saying that He
came "not to destroy the law but to fulfil it." The words "to fulfil"
of course mean not only to obey and carry out, but to complete.
In what sense is this teaching of our Lord the completion of the law?
For the law of Moses, like every other law, was concerned with
regulating the relations of men to one another, as well as their duties
towards God; and it enforced what it enjoined by penalties.
At first sight no doubt it looks as if He were directly contradicting
what had been said to them of old time--
"Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not him that is
evil; but whosoever smites thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
the other also, and if any man will sue thee at the law, and
take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also."
How is this the fulfilment or completion of the Mosaic or any other law?
At this distance of time, it is hard to remember what was the original
significance of the law of retaliation. We are inclined to think that
the words "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" are intended to
give a licence to that degree of vindictiveness; but on the contrary, in
the primitive stage in which that enactment was given, it was not a
licence given to man's instinct for vengeance, but a limitation set upon
that primitive and animal instinct, whose natural tendency, if
unchecked, is to take two eyes for an eye and a set of teeth for a
tooth. The _lex talionis_ said--Only an eye for an eye, and only a
tooth for a tooth.
Our Lord carries the same principle further; not even that degree of
vindictiveness is allowed. The first necessity was to put bounds upon
man's natural and almost insatiable lust for vengeance. The next was to
tell him that the whole method of vengeance could never succeed in what
is its only really justifiable aim. For what is the true function of
the law, whether that of Moses or any other? It is always two-fold; it
must always aim not merely at checking the evil act, but at converting,
if possible, the evil will.
There has never, I suppose, been any legal system which was not
justified by its upholders on this ground. No one is really content, to
think that the punishment which he inflicts, or may imagine himself as
inflicting through the agency of the State, or in any other way, is
purely deterrent; he always thinks it will also be reformative. But,
how are you as a matter of fact to attack the evil will? The mere
infliction of penalty will not of any necessity achieve this goal at
all. We know that it is very seriously debated whether our whole system
of punishment in the civilised States of to-day has any really moral
effect, at least upon those who fall under its most severe penalties.
Probably most convicts leave prison worse men than when they entered.
For if a man is below a certain level in moral attainment, pain, far
from purifying, only brutalises and coarsens. It is only those who are
already far in the path of spiritual growth who are purified by
suffering, even as the Captain of our Salvation was thus made perfect.
But it is still true that the aim of all penal law is twofold; to check
the evil act and, if possible, to convert the evil will.
Now, as I suggested previously, mere restraint may have indirectly a
positive moral value; as for example in the case of a child, who is
potentially of very diverse characters. He has the capacity to grow in
many different directions, and it will depend very much upon his
surroundings, and the influences which play upon his character, whether
this set of instincts or that receives development; and here merely to
keep forcibly within bounds the development of certain impulses, which
tend to grow out of proportion to the proper harmony and economy of
nature, may indirectly have the effect of preserving that harmony and
thus develop genuine virtue in the soul. And again, with those whose
characters are relatively formed, the direct restraint, for example, of
State action may have positive moral value, inasmuch as it is the
expression of the moral judgment of Society. What most of us would
shrink from, if we were in danger of imprisonment, would not be the
physical inconvenience, which is not very great, but the fact that we
should have brought ourselves under the censure of Society, and acted in
such a way as to put ourselves below the level which Society generally
considers itself justified in enforcing. And so the purely restraining
influence of the State, even operating through force, may have a
positive moral value, because it represents, and is the only way at
present devised of representing, the judgment of Society, and to shrink
from the judgment of Society is, so far as it goes, a really moral fear.
It is not indeed the highest ground for the avoidance of evil, but it is
a moral ground, for it arises from our recognition of our
fellow-membership in Society with those whose censure we fear.
But the State in all its actions is of necessity mechanical, and cannot
take account of the individual, and all that makes him what he is. The
State officer cannot know the prisoner in such a way as really to
determine the treatment allotted to him in the light of what is best for
his spiritual welfare; and therefore he has to fall back upon rough and
ready rules which will never be perhaps very far from the right
treatment, though they may fail to allot the ideal treatment in any
single case. And here, in parenthesis, let me just mention that this is
the chief reason why metaphors and comparisons drawn from the law-courts
are so sadly misleading when used to illustrate the relation between the
human soul and God; our only fear of the judge is concerned with what he
will do to us; but what we fear with our father, on earth or in Heaven,
is not so much what he will do to us, as the pain we have caused--"There
is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt Thou be feared."
Our Lord's method is the only one that aims straight at the evil will;
it is the only method which has in it any real hope of converting the
individual. It may fail time and again; but it is the only one that has
a chance of real and absolute success.
Let us look for a moment at the instances which He chooses to illustrate
the principle, and we shall see at once that they are carefully chosen.
All the acts chosen are such as are particularly vexatious to the
ordinary natural and selfish man--being struck in the face; having a
vexatious suit brought against one; being pestered by a beggar; being
compelled to do something for the public service when we are busy.
Those are just the things which the natural man resents and which the
real Christian will not mind at all. For, after all, there is no real
injury in being struck in the face, or having one's coat taken away.
What one minds is the insult to one's precious dignity; and the
Christian who, by definition, has forgotten all about himself will not
mind such injuries at all. Therefore if the acts commanded are
spontaneously done and not done with a laborious conscientiousness--that
is to say if they are done in the spirit of Christianity, and not in the
spirit of Pharisaism--they will express a complete conversion in the
will of him who does them; they will express absolute conquest of self,
and a concern solely for the welfare of him with whom we are dealing;
and there is no heart yet made that can resist the appeal of love which
is constant in spite of every betrayal, the appeal of trust which is
renewed in spite of endless disappointments.
"He that loveth his brother"--says St. John--"walketh in the light." He
is the man who knows where he is going, because he is the man who
understands people and sees into their hearts. They will reveal to him
secrets of their nature, which they will hide from the contemptuous and
indifferent; and even if at first he is from time to time disappointed
and betrayed, in the end his method will succeed, because love and trust
create what they believe in.
The justice then, which we find at work in the State, is always a
provisional thing pointing us to something more, something which the
State itself by its very constitution is unable to provide, but which
God provides in Christ, and will enable us in our measure to provide, if
we are faithful, at least in the circle of our immediate activities, so
far, that is, as the range of our sympathy will carry us.
II.--The value of the justice which the State is able to secure actually
resides for the most part in the liberty which it makes possible.
Justice, as the State interprets it, is of itself, as far as I can see,
almost totally valueless. I can see no kind of advantage in merely
allotting so much pain to so much evil. There is moral evil in a man
and you put physical evil into him as well. I do not see how you have
made him or anyone else the better. Only in so far as the punishment is
either deterrent or reformative, has it any moral value at all; and only
in the latter case, where it reforms the character, can the value be
called in the strict sense moral. So far as it only deters men from evil
acts which they would desire to commit, it may add to the convenience of
the other members of Society, but it is not doing any direct moral good.
Indirectly, however, it has moral results; for when we enquire in what
sense we can say that such justice as the State secures produces
liberty, the first answer is to be found in the obvious and elementary
fact that the liberty of every one of us depends upon our knowledge that
certain impulses and instincts in other people, should they arise, will
be checked and not allowed to receive full expression. Our liberty is
increased by that check put upon predatory or homicidal impulses in
other people, and their liberty depends upon the suppression of such
impulses in us.
So far it would seem that there must be in the most obvious sense of the
words a certain curtailment of everybody's liberty in order that anybody
may have liberty at all. If we are all to be free to indulge our
passions of anger and hatred, should such arise within us, then it is
quite clear that there will be very little freedom of action in the
Society which rests on that principle. Everyone will go about in fear
of everyone else.
But that is a very small part of the business. The chief contribution of
such justice to human liberty is that it supplies the necessary
conditions of discipline without which there can be no liberty. We
think of liberty as meaning freedom from external constraint. We think
that an act of ours is free when we can say, "I did it, and no one made
me do it"; but very little reflection is sufficient to convince us that
a man whose life is actually governed by one or several over-developed
passions which he will, as a matter of fact, always gratify when
opportunity offers, in spite of the damage that is done to his whole
life and to his permanent and deliberate purpose, is not really a free
man. To be tied and bound with the chain of our sins is just as much
slavery as to be in the ownership of another man; and we can acquire the
real liberty which is worth having, the liberty, that is, to shape our
lives, to live according to our own purpose, following out our own
ideal, only in so far as our natures have been welded by discipline into
unity, so that we are no longer a chaos of impulses and instincts, any
of which may be set in motion by the appropriate environment, but are
self-governing persons controlling our own lives.
Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in
both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled
by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled,
and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which
our whole nature is given. Legislation is really an instrument of
self-discipline. The people who write books about political philosophy
are mainly members of the respectable classes. They naturally find it
rather difficult to envisage themselves as liable to commit murder and
the like; and they are therefore very liable to represent the criminal
law of the State as being enacted against a few undisciplined or
recalcitrant members. But when we look at the thing more closely, we
see that what a community does, especially a democratic community, when
it passes a law, is to invoke, every member upon his own head, the
penalties enacted by that law, if he should do the act which the law
forbids.
Let us consider, for example, an international convention. What is the
use of nations agreeing with one another not to do something, for
instance not to poison wells, unless there is some chance that in a
moment of strong temptation they may desire to do it? They therefore
strengthen their deliberate purpose to avoid such acts by entering into
an agreement with one another always to avoid them. There would be no
object in doing this unless they needed help, or thought that they might
at some time need help, in living up to their own purposes.
And we have to remember that in this way the law of the State is, as a
matter of fact, perpetually operating upon every one of us. We are
often liable to suppose that it is only active in relation to those
people against whom it is definitely set in motion; but it does operate
in the life of every one of the citizens of a community; because the
fact that certain actions would involve us in State-penalty most
undoubtedly does keep all of us from indulging in those actions at
certain times, even though at calm moments we recognise that it would be
wrong to do so. Trivial instances are nearly always the clearest. Most
of us, I suppose, are sufficiently honest to desire in general terms to
pay for what we buy; and we should perhaps usually pay for our places in
the train, even if there were no ticket-inspector; still, the existence
of the inspector just clinches the matter.[#] The possibility of the
penalty as a matter of fact helps to maintain our general, permanent,
and deliberate purpose of honesty against a momentary temptation to be
dishonest; and so far it is helping us to live up to our purpose, or, in
other words, is increasing our real freedom. In fact, one main test of
good legislation is precisely whether it does or does not in this way
develop real freedom by increasing people's power to live by their own
deliberate purpose.
[#] I owe the illustration to Mr. A. L. Smith, of Balliol.
Now so far we have been considering Society as consisting of relatively
free persons (though the freedom exists in varying degrees, both as
regards the external constraint and capacity for self-control), these
persons having various claims which have to be regulated by the justice
which the State upholds; in other words, in this stage, we are regarding
justice in the way in which I suppose it is most usually regarded,
namely, as rendering to a man what is due to him. That is the
definition with which Plato in _The Republic_ starts his enquiry, and he
naturally found very soon that it would not work.[#] It will not work
because the moral values of people are not determinable. You cannot, as
a matter of fact, ever say what is the relative weight of the various
claims that may be made on behalf of this or that man. Most
particularly there is the perpetual conflict between the actual and the
potential worth of any men.
[#] He appropriately puts it in the mouth of Polemarchus, the
well-brought up, but wholly inexperienced, young man.
Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that
which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to
be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they
are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well
then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call
the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are
contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the
public welfare. And yet that is not their fault; they have been brought
up, it may be in squalor, it may be in luxury, but in either case in
circumstances which have made them almost incapable of anything like
good citizenship. Are we to kill such persons, or leave them to starve,
in the interest of the public welfare? All human instincts will protest
that this is unjust, and that they can claim more than they can possibly
be represented as contributing, simply because they have had, as we say,
bad luck, and it is not their fault.[#]
[#] See Appendix III, _On Justice and Education_.
Let us try what happens if after Plato's example we turn the matter
upside down, and instead of saying that justice will be found when there
is rendered to each man what is due to him, we say that justice is found
when each man contributes what is due from him.
Now logically, of course, these two are the same, because duties and
rights are absolutely correlative. My rights constitute other people's
duties towards me, and their rights constitute my duties towards them.
The only difference is that it is far more easy in any given case to
determine what is due from somebody--what can be claimed from him--than
to determine what is due to him.
In this imperfect stage of the world, where we are passing through the
transition from something like barbarism to Christian civilisation, as
we hope, it is possible that of two correlative processes, one will
actually carry us further than the other even though it is logically
inseparable from it. And in fact we find at once, that if we put it
this way, and say that the principle of justice is not that each man
should obtain what is due to him, but that each should contribute what
is due from him, we are coming to the central principle of God's
administration of His world, which is that we should render to every man
not according to his desert, but according to his need. Indeed for
practical purposes, if we are wishing to bring justice into our own
dealings, and into the dealings of any public body with which we may
have influence, this principle will carry us further than any
other--"Render to every man according to his need."
Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is
a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost
his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed
were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us
of course will say--"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and
it is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all
will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make
use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this
place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such
as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own
fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with
us, where would our redemption be?--"It is his own fault, now he must
suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety.
It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love
toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."
No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other."
It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him
money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would
otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than
money; he needs our time--time to make friends; time to remove his
suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect
what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build
them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian
will be bound to give it, and he will say--"It was his own fault; he
cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him
according to his need."
And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice
which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular
life of which the State is the highest organisation--The recognition of
personality.
I do not know at all what forms your labour unrest in takes in this
continent, but I claim to have considerable opportunities of knowing
what is the root of that unrest in England, at least among the better
type of working people; for I am concerned with an organisation which is
at work among working folk all over England, having an enormous
membership, and which aims at claiming for them, and supplying them
with, further facilities for education. Those with whom I thus come in
contact are picked men, no doubt, because those who join an educational
association are thereby marked off at once as intellectually at least
more alert than those who do not join; but as I go about them, I find no
room whatever for doubting that the root of the labour unrest in England
is a sense that the whole organisation of our life constitutes a
standing insult to the personality of the poor man. Why, for example,
he feels, should it be possible for a well-to-do man to secure for
himself, or for his wife, or for his child, the medical attendance that
may be needed, while he in very many parts of our country depends upon
institutions maintained by voluntary contributions? It is quite
compatible with gratitude to those whose generosity maintains these
institutions to feel that for such service he should not be dependent
upon anybody's charity at all--whether the solution is to be that the
State maintain such institutions or that every man who is doing his fair
share of the country's work receive for himself the wage that will
enable him to deal with such emergencies as they arise.
Above all, men feel the denial of their personality in the organisation
of industry itself. Men have fought and died for political liberty,
which means the right to have a voice in making the laws by which you
are to be governed. But the laws of the State do not for the most part
invade a man's home, whereas the regulations of an industrial firm do.
They determine when he shall get up in the morning and when he shall go
to bed; they determine whether he shall have any leisure for the pursuit
of any interest of his own. In the making of those regulations he has,
as a rule, no voice whatever, and no opportunity of making his views
understood except by threat, the threat of a strike. The men feel that
they are what they are sometimes called, "hands" not persons. They are
the tools of other men. You must apply all this to your own country, if
and so far as it does apply. But one might easily imagine a village in
Lancashire, or any other industrial district where all the inhabitants
are dependent upon one industry; there are many such; and the control of
that industry may be in the hands of a Board of Directors, settled
perhaps in London; it may only meet a few times a year for the
transaction of business, and otherwise not exist at all. They never see
the people whose lives and destinies they thus control. The shareholders
who want their dividends make no enquiries as a rule about the
conditions in which the work is done. If that Board of Directors
mismanages its business the village in Lancashire goes hungry. If that
Board of Directors, when they have already got a full supply of work,
takes on another large contract, that village in Lancashire works
overtime; and the people have no say in the matter. Whatever else that
is, it is not liberty, and in the judgment of the people themselves it
is not justice. And indeed it is not either justice or liberty as we
have learned in other spheres to understand those terms. The economic
organisation of life comes far closer to the individual citizen than the
political organisation, and the development of justice remains
incomplete until it has secured liberty of an economic as well as a
political kind.