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percentage-nay almost the whole of what is ordinarily administered as punishment,-if we did not expressly include the idea of pain inflicted by righteousness upon the potentially righteous, with a view to making their potential righteousness actual? In the case of a parent punishing a little child, or the master punishing ordinary schoolboy, this comes near to being the whole account of the matter. Of course the master or the parent may lose his temper, and become himself quite unideal. But so far as he represents truly the ideal action of righteousness, his action in punishing may itself be called the necessary mode of the operation, under the existing conditions, of love. It is the loveitself another aspect of righteousness the love which, fixing its eyes upon the unseen possibilities of the child's true nature, discerns through what passage of pain he, though now marred by identification with unrighteousness, can be weaned and won from what he is to what he ought to be.

But what is true so broadly of the parent, and true to a large extent of the ideal schoolmaster, by no means ceases to be true when we think of the relation of the judge to the prisoner standing in the dock for sentence. Even here it is true that punishment is rarely inflicted without the hope, at least, and desire, and purpose, that the punishment may be a means of moral good.

It may be said, perhaps, that, at least in the case of the magistrate, any purpose such as this is only subsidiary and incidental: that here at least, punishment, in its primary significance, is directly retributive; and, what is more, that the principles of retributive punishment, as judicially administered, imply the conception of what may fairly be called an equation between the quantum of past guilt and the quantum of inflicted pain.

It may therefore be worth while to insist that both these

aspects, the retributive aspect, and the equation aspect, of human justice, belong indeed in fact to human justice; but belong to it not as it is justice, but as it is human; belong, that is, and can be seen directly to belong, to the necessary imperfectness of such corporate and social justice as is possible on earth. Thus it is true even of a schoolmaster's justice, and much more of that administered by magistrates under the letter of statute law, that discipline must be administered by even-handed rule. What is the practical meaning of even-handed rule? It means that cases which themselves may be ever so diverse, if you look below the surface, must be treated in classes, as substantially alike. It means in a word that the individual must be sacrificed to the community. Within narrow limits no doubt there is a modifying power. But speaking broadly it means that again and again a punishment must be inflicted upon an individual with a view to surrounding society,-that is to its general effect upon other people, which would certainly not be the wisest, the best, or the justest,-if there were nothing whatever to be considered but the inner truth of the personality of the offender himself. Divine justice is exactly just to the individual. But then Divine justice presupposes omniscience. The attempt to conduct human justice on Divine principles, but with human faculties, would end simply in the overthrow of all justice whatever. Human justice, to be justice at all, must necessarily under human conditions, be rough, inexact,—that is (too often) unjust. And yet human justice broadly represents, even when, in close detail, it travesties, the Divine. It is one of those instances in which a Divine reality is represented by a human counterpart; but only on condition that the human counterpart maintains keen consciousness of its distinction from, in the last resort even its fundamental contrast with, that Divine which indeed it represents, but represents only

in rough figure, through incompetent material. Now it is exactly this inherent impossibility of being perfectly just, which fastens upon human justice the retributive as its most characteristic aspect. In justice that was ideal, because Divine, retribution would not (to say the least) be the one simple differentia of punishment.

And the equation theory is only a further adaptation of the retributive. It is only when our thought is dealing with guilt or punishment as counters—that is, as imaginary existences abstracted from the personalities of the guilty or the punished, that the equation theory even appears to explain anything. Remember that sin means a condition of a personality, and that punishment is a treatment of a personality; and at once it is felt that equivalence between sin and punishment, even if it were possible to establish any measure of equivalence, would have no meaning and lead to no conclusion at all. No one, indeed, who views these things from the point of view of personality and personal character, even professes to believe in such an equivalence. No schoolmaster really supposes that the bad boy, however adequately punished, is a good boy, or even is, by virtue of the mere quantum of punishment, any whit the less bad than he was. It may be quite right and wise to treat what may be called his "school account" as closed. But this only brings into relief the really obvious fact that this "school account" is a very external thing, and is far from wholly coinciding with that inward reality which it outwardly, no doubt, represents. We may say of it, as we said of human justice, that it is a sort of symbol or parable of something which it only symbolizes truly, so long as it does not claim identity with it.

From this point of view we may recognize that all human punishment, the sentence passed by the judge upon the prisoner, no less than the treatment of the refractory schoolboy, aims at, and at least outwardly re

presents and symbolizes, a certain change in the culprit's own personality. Whether the culprit is at all inwardly changed by it, is another question. But outwardly at least and symbolically, the prisoner standing for sentence is made to occupy the attitude of a penitent accepting discipline. If his punishment really effects its proper object-its only proper object, so far as the prisoner personally is concerned-it does so not by the quantum of pain endured by him, but by the extent to which that pain is in him taken up into the change of self which we call penitence.

Now the object, for several pages past, has been to try and break down the verbal antithesis, quoted just now, between discipline and punishment. I hold that we must emphatically claim that punishment, inflicted as discipline, is punishment. To rule out from the word "punishment" all suffering inflicted or accepted, in the name of righteousness, and unto righteousness as an end-to rule out all personal discipline meant for personal holiness—would be to rule out at least the far larger part of all that any of us has, in fact, ever known or meant by punishment.

May we, then, go at once to the other extreme? May we say that we know no punishment which is not discipline? May we say broadly that the suffering in punishment is always, and only, a means? and that its whole real essence is restorative? It is precisely the premature tendency to embrace such an overstatement as this, which is in all probability the chief justification for the overstatement on the opposite side.

To say that there is no punishment which is not restorative will not account even for all the facts familiar in human experience. It is plain that if we begin to punish with a moral intention in respect of the punished, hoping for his amendment; our hopes may utterly fail. More and more, it may be, the depraved man becomes a human tiger.

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Then we punish, if we have the power, not the less but the more. If all hope should die down utterly, it is then that punishment would reach its supreme culmination. would be the final mark and seal of the consummated impossibility of forgiveness. Even indeed from the very first we punish-if it is ours to punish,-alike the hopeful and the unhopeful criminals: and certainly do not punish those who seem obdurate less than those of whom we have good hope. And human experience herein is in analogy with the revelation of God. We dare not explain away the awful word "Hell," as meaning only a purgatory. We dare not, until the possibility of Hell has been authoritatively explained away, deny the ultimate possibility of the idea of a punishment which is not restorative.

How, then, do we now stand? It may be agreed, perhaps, First, that all punishment is of necessity exercised upon a moral personality, a personality, that is, which either is, or has been, capable of righteousness: which either still is to be won to righteousness, or has only become incompatible with righteousness through its own resolutely immoral will. Secondly, that all punishment takes the form of distress and pain, whether chiefly of body or of mind. Thirdly, that this penal distress is correlated with wrongdoing, which is in the wrongdoer, and of which the wrongdoer is, or is capable of being, personally conscious. Fourthly, that this correlation of pain, in a conscious moral personality, with wrong, is itself an operation or effect of righteousness, which it manifests and vindicates.

But even when we agree upon these four points, we are met with a distinction, of crucial importance, between two contrasted ways in which such righteousness may be manifested, in an erring personality, as pain. It may be manifested within the personality, in the direction of a gradual re-identifying of the personality with righteousness.