the grave an unpunished criminal, surely (is the popular inference) if there be any God who abhors crime, he will punish it in a future world.--This logic widely approves itself concerning signally cruel tyrants, even among nations which hav no serious belief of general human immortality. Once uttered by Prophet, Priest or Poet, the idea sticks fast. Extreme cruelty of a man, whose power forbids any human tribunal to arrain him, must be punished after death, somehow, somewhere, by some unseen deity. So felt and so judged Pagan Antiquity. Even after the special mythologies were exploded by philosophic thought, it was hard for philosophers themselves to disown the claim of "late-avenging Retribution." They discerned that punishment, if delayed and put out of sight, very ill deters a hardened conscience from crime; moreover, that to punish a criminal after death brings no solace to his victim; therefor such punishment is mere futil Vengeance, in fact, is useless Cruelty disguised as Justice. Though they were unable to believe it, yet in argument the popular instinct was distressingly against them and difficult to parry. MERCY was in a human judge an unpermitted weakness: could a Divine judge be so weak as to let off a high criminal with impunity? Greek and Roman philosophers, unable to accept as Justice punishment that comes too late, adopted as moral the maxim of assassinating a tyrant who dominates and crushes the human tribunal before which he ought to be arrained. Thus Timoleon for assassination of his brother was honored by all Greece, and to his last day was held to be a model of virtue; thus the assassins of Caius Julius were panegyrized and envied by Cicero. But in the latter case events painfully showed that to slay the tyrant did not slay the tyranny. With the old PAGANS Nature and God were not identified. Their chief God was a sublime Potentate, sitting external to Nature. Nature or Fate had allotted to every God his special task. The tyrant Phalaris, if brought up before the tribunal of Pluto or Rhadamanthys by the Furies, and permitted to defend himself, had no case for turning on his judge and asking: "Why did "not you arrest my career earlier and rescue the innocent "from my cruelty?" For the judge would reply: “Fate gave me no jurisdiction on upper Earth; my sole "function is to punish here those who were guilty there. With CHRISTIANS and JEWS this after-death tribunal is only an anachronistic survival of a Pagan theory which with us is illogical and worse than absurd. For, God is with us the animating power of Nature, the force by which we breathe and liv, a Mind cognizant of our purposed wickedness. A magistrate who knows that crime is being planned, yet remains inactiv and allows it to work cruel wrong on the innocent, though he has police force abundantly at hand, is condemned as AN ACCOMPLICE in the crime. We cannot attribute to the Supreme Ruler inability to cut short the career of the criminal, yet (for his own excellent reasons) he deliberately refuses to put forth his resistless power. This undeniable and glaring fact utterly overthrows all analogy to a human tribunal and human processes of Justice. The Power which calmly allows the perpetration of cruel guilt, cannot rationally be supposed to promote justice on the same lines as a human magistrate. Therefor all argument of a future tribunal based on such analogy is utterly futil. Delay of action until action is too late to save the innocent, foils all our reasonings from the imagined analogy. "As the Heavens ar higher than the Earth, so ar my ways higher than your ways," saith the Lord.-Later Isaiah. Tóроι Kaτidê appaσToi.*-Esch. Suppl. No plea for a future life is weaker, than that without it many wicked will escape punishment. But do they escape it, in this world? Very often, perhaps. I do not hold, with Socrates in Plato, even that the worst and most cruel tyrant is sensibly miserable: deadness of conscience encrusts sensibility. The bloodiest of the Huns or Moguls had no more consciousness of cruelty than English sportsmen in a battue: nor possibly had Nero or Torquemada. But however prosperous a selfish or malignant man may be, he forfeits all the highest joys; for these spring out of unselfishness and activ love. How much bad men punish themselves, only the All-seeing Eye can know. I do not pretend to clear this great argument and "vindicate the Most High." Faith is severely strained by the awful results of stupidity and dull selfishness,-say nothing of wanton cruelty; but whatever the strain on Faith, no relief is brought by the theory of Punishment in the Future; for, it comes too late to rescue sufferers; which is the vital point. No Tartar, no Roman, no Russian tyrant could act with extreme inhumanity, were not his tools calloushearted. In our days, after War has been softened in many respects, Gibbon avows that even now (ch. xxvi., first paragraph) War is "out of all proportion more “calamitous than earthquakes, deluges, hurricanes and "volcanoes." War from a Maria Teresa or a Victoria may cause miseries worse than those of a Nero. War 60 *"In the straight line of Jove, though truthfully drawn, "The heart's desire of Jove is not easy to track. "For the paths of his heart stretch winding and overshadowed, loving princes and statesmen could not now inflict on the world this awful pest, had they not standing armies under hirelings ever eager for "glory;" that is, eager for the job of wholesale murder, with promotion to follow perhaps elevation to the Peerage. Before the age of Constantine the military profession was not accounted consistent with Christian duty. "Be not "partaker of other men's sins: keep thyself pure;" said good St. Paul. But now--the Churches make no protest against hiring oneself to be a blind tool of slaughter; our Anglican Church seems to glorify the profession. What is this, but to take part in a system of crime, and then claim that God will revenge it in a future life? Does not He claim of us to do our best to hinder and prevent it in this life? Who can imagin how different the world might now be, if in the last 1550 years the Catholic Church had continued to brand the trade of the hired soldier, ready for any or every war? SECTION XXI. COMPENSATION TO THE WRONGED. Two typical men, Leibnitz and Baxter, thought an Eternal Hell necessary to God's justice, and deserving of applause from all saints. But now from a far more compassionate heart with a mind untrammelled by traditional creeds rises a fervid claim of Redress in a future world to the innocent men or brutes who hav been wronged in this life. In bolder, harsher tone it is asserted,--"If there be no future life, GOD IS UNJUST to "wronged innocents." Such utterance from one in present agony, would elicit only pity and respect. Yet nearly every martyr C expecting cruelty, if asked beforehand whether he would count it a mercy never to hav been born, would emphatically disown the thought as false and impious. No one can measure the quantum of another's pains; but it is to me credible that the pangs of some diseases and of some accidents (as from fire or fracture) equal the worst misery which artificial cruelty can inflict. But what patient, in his severest pang ever called out: "God "owes me a compensation of bliss in a future world for "these torments." If no sufferer, except in madness, ever put in such a claim, who and where is the plaintiff who thus arrains the Author of his life, saying "God "has been unjust to me in this world, and thereby is in "an arrear of debt, which he is bound to repay to me, "his creature, in some future life ?" If any one seriously presses the argument, that God's world, as we know it, is so bad, as to make the Author liable to a claim of compensation for negligence and delay of justice; the reasoner seems bound to answer the question: "How "otherwise would you hav the world fashioned ?" John Stuart Mill drew an awful picture of elemental ravages in this world, as displaying the utter heartlessness of its Maker [if there were a Maker]; but he did not venture to tell us under what physical laws this world ought to exist, if its Author were benevolent. Philosophy becomes as childish as Epicurus, if it undertake such problems. If painful necessity forced on me the conclusion that this world is an "utter failure," and that in it God deals unjustly" with his own creatures, I should lose all confidence that he will be any the more just (as I measure Justice) in a future world. To avow that "Compensation "for Wrong" is required from him, appears to me a fatal concession from a pious Theist.---But I am asked, "What "comfort will you be able to giv to wretches,--diseased and "dying, guilty perhaps, yet foully wronged,--if you cannot |