But if this spirit of compassion were general, would virtue itself be
secure? Would not a fatal lenience towards vice become the temper of
society? Would not the immediate effect be the declaration of a
general amnesty towards every kind of wrong-doer, and from such an act
what could be expected but a rapid dissolution of the laws and
conventions that maintain the structure of society?
These are natural fears, and they are not altogether the fears of weak
and timid men. They will certainly be shared by all tyrants, all
persons whose tempers incline to absolutism, all believers in force as
the true dynamic of stable social government. To reason with such
persons is impossible, because their opinions are the fruit of temper,
and are therefore irrational. But even such persons are not destitute
of powers of observation, and in the long history of the world there is
a field of observation which no person of intelligence can neglect.
Do we find, as we survey this field, that force has ever proved the
true dynamic of stable social government? We find the exact contrary
to be true. The great empires of the past were founded on force and
perished, even as Napoleon discovered in his final reveries on human
history. Whenever force has been applied to maintain what seemed a
right social system it has uniformly failed. The Church of Rome
applied force to produce a world consonant with her ideas of truth; she
was all but destroyed by the recoil of her prolonged persecutions. The
Puritans were persecuted in the name of truth and virtue; they
triumphed. The Puritans in turn persecuted, under the impulse of
ideals that an impartial judgment must pronounce among the loftiest and
noblest that ever animated human hearts, and in turn they were
overthrown. Again and again, when crime has attained monstrous and
threatening proportions, laws of barbarous severity have been applied
for its repression; in not one solitary instance have they been
successful. The more barbarous and severe the law against crime, the
more has crime flourished. When men were hanged for petty theft, when
they were whipped at the cart's tail for seditious language, when they
were disembowelled for treasonable practices; theft, sedition, and
treason flourished as they have never flourished since. The very
disproportion and hideousness of the penalty inflamed men's minds to
the commission of wrong. On the contrary, the birth of lenience and
humanity was immediately rewarded by a decline of crime. These are
lessons which we do well to recollect to-day when statesmen advocate
the death penalty for the anarchist, irrespective of his exact crime;
when city councils propose the same penalty for those guilty of
outrages on women; when indignant mobs, in spite of law, and without
trial, burn at the stake offending negroes. If history teaches
anything with an emphasis at once clear and unmistakable, it is that
crime has never yet been abridged by brutal harshness, but has thriven
on it. History also teaches with an emphasis equally clear and
positive, that the spirit of love, manifesting itself in lenience,
compassion, and magnanimity, has constantly justified itself by the
reduction of crime, and the taming of the worst kind of criminal.
Is not this in itself a justification of the spirit of Jesus? Does it
not appear, on the review of nearly two thousand years of history, that
society has attained its greatest happiness and has reached its highest
condition of virtue, precisely in those periods when the gentle ideals
of Jesus have had most sway over human thought and action? And if this
be so, is it possible to doubt that society will only continue to
progress towards happiness and content in the degree that it obeys the
counsels of Jesus, making not force but love the great social dynamic,
which shall control all its operations and guide all its judgments?
It may appear impossible and inexpedient for the human judge to say to
the offender, "Neither do I condemn thee; go, sin no more"; but it is
very clear that the opposite course does by no means lead to a
cessation of sin. For what is the total result of all our punishments
in the name of law but the manufacture of criminals? According to our
theory of punishment a jail should be a seminary of virtue and
reformation. Men submitted to its discipline should come out new
creatures, cured of every tendency to crime. On the contrary, in nine
cases out of ten, they come out a thousandfold worse than they went in.
If this is not the case, it is because some Christian influence, not
included in our legal system, has reached them. But such influences
reach very few. The influences that operate in the great majority of
cases are wholly demoralizing. Those who enter a jail with genuine
intentions of reform speedily discover that they are not expected to
reform. They are branded indelibly. They are exposed to the
corruption of associates a hundredfold worse than themselves. They
leave the jail with every avenue of honest industry closed to them,
every man's hand against them, and no career possible to them but a
life of crime. When we consider these things we have little cause to
congratulate ourselves upon the results of our systems of justice.
Even a general amnesty towards every form of crime could scarcely
produce results more deplorable. Fantastic as it may appear, yet it
seems not improbable that the abolition of the jail and of all penal
law, might produce benefits for humanity such as centuries of
punishment on crime have wholly failed to produce.
But no one asks this at present, though the day may come sooner than we
think, when society, tired of the long failure and absolute futility of
all its attempts to cleanse the world of crime by penal enactments,
will make this demand. It is enough now if we press the question
whether there is not good ground in all this dreary history of futility
and failure, to make some attempt to govern society by the ideals of
Jesus? Why should not the Church replace the jail? Why should not the
offender be handed over to a company of Christian people, instead of a
company of jailers, paid to be harsh, and by the very nature of their
occupation trained to harsh tempers and cruel acts? Who are better
fitted for the custody of the criminal than people whose lives are
based on the merciful ideals of Jesus? How could such persons be
better employed than in devoting themselves to the restoration of
self-respect in the fallen, than in the attempt to nurture into vigour
his bruised or dormant instincts of right, than in the organized effort
to restore him to some place in society which should give him honest
bread in return for honest labour? Few men are criminals by choice.
Crime is more often the fruit of weakness than intention. Almost every
criminal would prefer an honourable life if he knew how to set about
it. Can we doubt that if Jesus presided in the councils of His Church
to-day, this would be one of the first directions in which He would
apply His energy? And who that surveys the modern Church with
undeflected judgment would not say that the Church would be a thousand
times dearer to the world, a thousand times more sacred, respected, and
authoritative, if instead of spending its time in spiritual
self-gratification, and its riches in the adornment of its worship, it
became the true Hospice of the Fallen and Unfortunate, thus
exemplifying in its action that love for men which was the essential
spirit of its Founder?
It will no doubt be replied that the Church already, by a thousand
institutions, of a philanthropic character, is attempting this very
work. But this is an evasion of the point, for such institutions only
begin their work of redemption when the existing social systems have
accomplished their work of destruction. Moreover, no institution,
however admirable, can be a substitute for the general action of the
Church. It is precisely this practice of substitution that accounts
for so much of the weakness of the Church. It is so much more easy and
pleasant to devolve upon others duties which to us are disagreeable, to
buy ourselves out of the conscription of personal duty, to persuade
ourselves that we have done all that can be asked of us when we have
given money for some worthy end, that it is not surprising that
multitudes of excellent and kindly people adopt such views and
practices. But, in doing so, they miss not only the joy of personal
well-doing, but also the sense of reality in the good that is done.
And the spectator and critic of the life of the Church, although he may
not be ignorant of the kind of work done by these institutions,
nevertheless is keenly conscious of the lack of reality in the work of
the Church, when he finds that its individual members are leading lives
in no way distinguishable by any active love for their fellows. For
the main reason why thoughtful men manifest aversion to the Church is
not found in dislike for her worship, or rejection of her creeds; it is
found rather in the sense of unreality in her life. Who, such men will
ask, among all this multitude of well-dressed worshippers, offering
their adoration to the Deity, visits the fatherless and widow in their
affliction, lays restraining hands upon the tempted, uplifts the fallen
or instructs the depraved, and so fulfills the true ideal of religion
pure and undefiled? What is the exact nature of their impact upon
society? Are they more merciful, more compassionate, more sympathetic
than average mankind? Do they not share the same social prejudices,
and guide their lives by the same social traditions as the bulk of men
and women? And if nothing more than this can be predicated of them,
how is it possible to avoid that impression of essential unreality
which is inseparable from the subscription to social ideals infinitely
loftier and purer than any others in human history, united with lives
which in no way rise above the average? Here is the true reason why
thoughtful men think lightly, and even scornfully of the Church. It is
not the truths and ideals of Jesus that offend them, but the travesty
of those truths and ideals in the average life of Christians.
But whenever any man attempts to live in the spirit of Jesus, the first
to rally to him are the sincere recusants from the church. He may be
satirised, and probably will be, as a moral anarchist, a fanatic, and a
hare-brained enthusiast; but nevertheless the best men will rally to
him. They rallied to a Father Dolling, they rally to a General Booth.
The types represented by such men lie far apart. One was so high a
ritualist as to be almost Catholic, the other is an ecclesiastic
anarchist so extreme that he dispenses with the sacraments. But these
things count for little; what the world sees in such men is the
essential reality of their life. One of the severest critics of
Dolling once went to hear him with the bitterest prejudice. He found
him with a couple of hundred thieves and prostitutes gathered round
him, to whom he was telling the love of Jesus in the simplest language.
"Dolling may be a Roman Catholic, or anything else he pleases," said
his critic; "all I know is that I never heard any one speak of Christ
like that," and from that hour he was his warmest friend. No doubt
similar conversions of sentiment have attended the ministries of all
apostolic men and women, of Francis and Catherine, of Wesley and
Whitfield, of Moody and General Booth. Men know by instinct the lover
of his kind. Men forgive a hundred defects for the sake of reality.
Perhaps the sublimest of all justifications of Christ's law of love is
that no man has truly practiced it in any age without himself rising
into a life of memorable significance, without immediate attestations
of its virtue in the transformation of society, without attracting to
himself the reverence and affection of multitudes of fellow workers who
have rendered him the same adoring discipleship that the friends of
Jesus gave to Him.
No doubt it will also be said that were the ideals thus indicated to
triumph, there would be nothing left for the direction of society but a
mischievous and sentimental spirit of amiability. The general fibre of
virtue would disintegrate. Pity for the sinner, pushed to such
extremes, would in the end mean tolerance for sin. But to such an
objection the character of Jesus furnishes its own reply. The
character of Jesus displays love in its supreme type, but it is wholly
lacking in that weak-featured travesty of love which we call
amiability. His hatred of sin was at times a furious rage. His lips
breathed flame as well as tenderness; "Out of His mouth proceeded a
sharp two-edged sword." We may search literature in vain to discover
any words half as terrible and scathing as the words in which Jesus
described sin. The psychological explanation is that great powers of
love are twin with great powers of hatred. The passionate love of
virtue is, in its obverse, an equally passionate hatred of vice. In
the same way the passionate love of our kind has for its obverse an
equally passionate hatred for the wrongs they endure. For this reason
justice and virtue are nowhere so secure as in the hands of men who
love their kind intensely. They are most insecure in the hands of the
cynic, who despises his kind, and therefore misapprehends their
conduct. For love, in its last analysis, is understanding, and where
there is understanding of our fellows there can hardly fail to be
wisdom in our method of treating them. That was the great secret of
Jesus in these examples which we have reviewed. He understood Simon
Peter. He understood the woman who was a sinner. He therefore knew
the only wise method of treating them. One with less pity might have
sent the harlot back to her shame, one with less love might have driven
Peter into permanent apostasy. But Jesus, in His understanding of the
human heart, knew the exact limit of reproof, the exact point at which
magnanimity became efficacious in redemption. Those who follow His
spirit will attain the same rare wisdom. They will never sacrifice
virtue to compassion, nor will they put virtue in opposition to
compassion. One question may suffice. Would we be content to leave
the administration of society in the hands of Jesus? Would we
confidently submit our own case to His jurisdiction? If, in every
dispute between men and nations, in every case of wrong and crime,
Jesus were the one Arbiter, would the world be better ruled, would the
probable course of events be such as to increase the sum of human
happiness? We can scarcely hesitate in the reply--we, who daily pray
that His kingdom may come. And if to such questions we return our
inevitable affirmative, we cannot doubt that society has everything to
gain in being governed by those who live most closely in the spirit of
Jesus; that they, and they only, are the true leaders and judges of the
nations.