Or it may be manifested upon, and at the expense of, the personality;—the personality being regarded as something which righteousness can only be righteous by condemning with inexorable condemnation. The point at present chiefly urged is that of these two contrasted alternatives, neither may be excluded from our thought of possibility, and neither may be excluded from our use of the word "punishment." The word is applicable alike in the one case and the other, however different its import may become. And we may venture to suggest that attempts to conceive of punishment have too often broken down, because the conceptions really applied only to the one, or only to the other, of the two diverse characters of which punishment is capable.

But there is something more to be said about the distinction. Let us begin by asking what it is upon which the distinction turns. The answer is that it altogether turns upon the reception of punishment by the person punished. But this suggests another point about the character of the distinction. We have put the two senses of punishment as sharply contrasted. A process of love is indeed very different from a process of damnation. But it may not unreasonably be asked-How should the one word mean two such different things? And then, in another form, the same answer comes back; that different as they are in their result, in origin and inception they are not different. They begin as one thing. As far as the chastising righteousness is concerned, they would also continue as one. The difference comes in, not so much from the different action of the punisher, as from the difference in the personality that receives the punishment.

In other words, all punishment begins as discipline. In so far as my disciplinary suffering educates me towards penitence, it is itself a mode of my progressive capacity of righteousness. It is a process-as inchoate and imperfect

as you please; but still it is a process, the ultimate climax of which, supposing that it could ever reach its ultimate climax, would be the real and consummated triumph of righteousness within myself.

The antithesis of righteousness against unrighteousness is, of course and always, absolute and irreparable. And one aspect of punishment, from its most rudimentary up to its gravest stages, may be said to be the manifestation of this antithesis. But the very manifestation of this antithesis, in the way of punishment, in whatever intermediate sense it may be viewed as retributive, has, for its ultimate object, the welfare, not the hurt, of the sinner who is punished. Its latent retributive character (if the word may be used legitimately for the moment) is yet latent and secondary in reference to the primary purpose of punishment, which is a purpose of beneficent love. Only in proportion as this fades out of sight, through the sinner's determined impenitence, does the punishment begin to be characterized at all primarily as retributive pain.

This purpose of beneficent love is, we may venture to suggest, the proper character and purpose of punishment.

But this purpose, or process, may be defeated, by the obdurate wickedness of the person punished. Then the punishment, whose purpose was discipline, has failed of its purpose. The punishment, which has failed in its purpose as discipline, remains as vengeance. There always was this aspect, or possibility, about punishment. From the first it was true that, just in proportion as punishment was not, as discipline, effective :—just in proportion as it was not taken up into the character as penitence :-just in proportion (in other words) as it was not transmuted, within the personality, from an outward infliction of pain into an inward correspondence with righteousness:—just in that proportion it stood, or was ready to stand,—as retribution pure and simple. And if the personality

should become, at last, the final antithesis to all capacity of penitence or righteousness, then the awful climax of punishment would be reached, when it is the inexorable manifestation of righteousness,-no longer, less or more, within the personal character, but at the expense of the personality, proved finally incompatible with righteousness. Righteousness, inexorably righteous, at the cost,-to the ruin,-of all that the very word "I" means, or can ever mean; this is indeed the extreme damnation of hell.

Hitherto we have been content to make use of such phrases as the "infliction" of punishment, by a "chastising" righteousness.

It is obvious, of course, that in all the lower analogues of punishment with which human experience is familiar, a punishment implies a punisher, exercising, with effect, the will to punish. But it is well to remember that infliction from without, by another, so far from being an essential element in all thought of punishment, tends more and more completely to disappear, as having no longer even an accidental place, in those deeper realities of punishment, which human punishings do but outwardly symbolize. The more we discern their process and character, the more profoundly do we recognize that the punishments of God are what we should call self-acting. There is nothing in them that is arbitrary, imposed, or, in any strict propriety of the word, inflicted. As death is the natural consummation of mortal disease, not as an arbitrary consequence inflicted by one who resented the mortal disease, but as its own inherent and inevitable climax; so what is called the judgment of God upon sin is but the gradual necessary development, in the consistent sinner, of what sin inherently is. The whole progress of sin is a progressive alienation from God; and the climax of such a progressive alienation is that essential incompatibleness with God which we call hell. "The lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin; and the sin, when it is

full-grown, bringeth forth death." Nothing is further necessary for man's damnation, than that man, being in himself identified with sin, should be left by God altogether to himself.

It is of considerable importance to insist upon this spontaneous or inherent character of the consequence of sin, in face of a tendency to emphazise the idea of the infliction, and the inflicter, as part of the ultimate analysis of punishment; and still more, whenever practical corollaries are drawn, representing God in the character of a merciless avenger, who has once pronounced, and will not be persuaded to withdraw, the sentence of His arbitrary doom. But apart from false imaginations such as these, the wrath of God, and the judgment of God, are themselves emphatically scriptural phrases. And if it is an aspect of the nature and being of God, as indeed it is, that (since righteousness is life, and life is righteousness) therefore sin must work out its own inevitable consummation as death; it is plain that there is a sense in which the doom of sin may be truly called the judgment, because it is a corollary of the being, of God. But however legitimate, in their own way, such phrases may be, it is clear, on the practical side, that they can easily be pressed to the point of very serious error; and clear that, if examined theologically, they have (to say the least) to be qualified by conceptions in which the intervention of an external punisher has, from first to last, no place. The chastising, or avenging, of righteousness, may still be legitimate, or, indeed, indispensable, phrases; but in the use of them it is certainly necessary to bear jealously in mind the very considerable qualification of meaning, without which they would still be liable to mislead.

But if the word punishment is capable of these twoso widely diverging-developments and interpretations, it

1 Jas. i. 15 (R.V.)

is well to consider, a little further, the character of the contrast between the two. Let us take a case of conspicuous wrongdoing. A man is guilty of a cowardly murder. What are the penal consequences of his guilt? No doubt in various ways the proper consequences may be averted or delayed. But (perversions apart) there are at least these two streams of proper consequence; on the one hand, the police and the magistrate, pursuit, arrest, judgment, the gallows, all which might naturally be summed up as vengeance: and on the other hand, wholly apart from anything of this kind, the sting of inward guilt, the penal misery, inherent, progressive,—in the end (it may be) stifling even to life, the penal misery of a murderer's consciousness.

These two things, of course, are perfectly separable. Indeed we naturally think of them as separate. Consider, then, first, the vengeance of the gallows by itself. Of all such vengeful punishment it must be observed that, however righteous (in many aspects) the infliction of the vengeance may be, it does not, of itself, the least affect, or tend to affect, the criminal's character. There is indeed, in the public infliction of disgrace and punishment, a certain sense of homage rendered to righteousness. This homage to righteousness which the personal endurance (of whatever kind) represents, would be realized perfectly in the perfect contrition of the criminal. Where there is no such contrition, the true homage to righteousness in his external disgrace, is, so far as he is concerned, only symbolized, not attained. But only when all idea of his penitence is eliminated, does the punishment become purely and simply the retaliation of vengeance, inflicted from without by another: and the homage to righteousness is in no sense within, but at the expense of, the personality of the criminal.

The murderer, because duly hanged, is not the less

B