thing from taking the imperfect experience as we find it; and, without distinction, assuming blindly that whatever we there find,-in human free will, for instance, or in human penitence, is itself a necessary element in what the words "free will" or "penitence" properly mean.

It follows that our inquiry is ideal even more immediately than it is practical. We desire not so much to find a working theory, say, of punishment, for our own ordinary use of it, as to find its ultimate meaning in the highest possibilities of human consciousness. Rudimentary experience of punishment comes in chiefly as supplying the data for a theory which will certainly transcend all present experience; but which, as the goal towards which even the earliest experience is working, will really illuminate and explain, as certainly as it transcends, all its own rudimentary beginnings.

But it is time to come face to face with our inquiry. What, then, first of all, is to be the real meaning, for us, of the word "punishment"?

As a preliminary answer let us take what will embody at all events a good deal of the popular feeling as to the meaning of punishment. Punishment, according to this, may be described as pain; deserved pain; avenging pain; pain that is, as pain, inflicted, from without, by another,— because of, and in proportion to, wrongdoing. The cause is the wrongdoing of the person punished. The action is the action of another. The object of the action is to hurt. And the hurt constitutes a kind of equation with the wrongdoing. If the person has been rather wicked, he has to be hurt a little. If he has been very wicked, he has to be hurt a great deal. If the question be asked, what is the further object to be gained by the suffering of the guilty person, the answer will be that there is no object within the person himself: that the object of punishment regarded as punishment is a public declaration or manifestation on

behalf of righteousness. It expresses the righteousness of the punisher; it exhibits righteousness to all those who stand by and look on. But, in respect of the punished, the direct object of the punishment, as punishment, is simply that he should suffer.

I may say that in these descriptive words, I have before me the view of punishment which I understand to be taken by Dr Dale, a view which the position commonly accorded to his volume on the Atonement would appear to stamp as at least a general and representative view. Not reformation, he insists, but retribution is the essential view of punishment. It is not, to quote his own words, "a painful process to effect future reformation; it is the suffering which has been deserved by past sin. To make it anything else than this is to destroy its essential character."1 Again, "the only conception of punishment which satisfies our strongest and most definite moral convictions"

2

represents it as pain and loss inflicted for the violation of a law." "Suffering inflicted upon a man to make him better in the future is not punishment, but discipline."3 "By some external force or authority he is being made to suffer the just consequence of his past offences. Whatever moral element there is in punishment itself-as punishment -is derived from the person or power that inflicts it."4

I propose to criticize and to disallow the position which these phrases represent. But, before going further, I should like to point out that whilst these expressions of Dr Dale's tend certainly too much to an idea of punishment as an external transaction of an arithmetical or quantitative kind, there are, nevertheless, on analysis, at least three positive strains of thought underlying them, which we may, without hesitation, accept. The three are these first, whatever its ultimate rationale may be, punishment takes the form of suffering: suffering of body, 2 P. 383. P. 383. • P. 386.

1 P. 376.

perhaps, but suffering anyhow, whether through the body or not, of mind and spirit. Secondly, this suffering is addressed to, and has direct correspondence with, a sense of guilt. It has no meaning, except in relation to the capacity, in the sufferer, of a consciousness of guilt. If I am to receive punishment as punishment, and to put some meaning into that word punishment as distinct from the merely physical sensation of pain, I must absolutely have some sense of right and wrong; some capacity at least of self-judgment, and of saying of myself, in the light of what is right, that I am identified with wrong. Even at this stage I cannot help remarking in parenthesis that to correlate punishment with a capacity of self-consciousness in wrongdoing is not the same thing as to correlate it with wrongdoing simply-apart from consciousness of wrong; and that the difference between the two will work out very importantly in the result. Thirdly, it follows from what has been said about self-consciousness of wrong in the light of what is right, that the pain which is recognized as punishment is thereby recognized as somehow representing and proceeding from righteousness: it is a manifestation or mode of righteousness: it is, in some way, the effect or operation of righteousness declaring and effecting itself upon (at least) if not within, me. It is, then, not simply a hurting, but the hurting of righteousness, the assertion of righteousness in the form of the chastisement of unrighteousness.

Now so far I have endeavoured to put, in my own way rather than in Dr Dale's, three thoughts which seem to be implied in Dr Dale's conception. But there is a fourth consideration, clearly indeed implied in the way in which the three have been stated, which should be emphasized as cardinal for any real understanding of punishment. It is then of real importance to insist that, whatever punishment means, it is impossible to punish anything

other than a conscious personality. Punishment only has meaning in-and in reference to-a person punished. You can break to pieces a stick that has hurt you: you can burn to ashes a paper that contains a slander against you: but you cannot punish anything inanimate. If you talk of punishing an animal, or try to punish it in fact, you can still do this only so far as you first endow it, or assume it to be endowed, with personal qualities for the purpose. You assume self-conscious identity, you assume continuous memory, you assume a power of moral discrimination. It is not of course to my present purpose to ask how far the assumption may be true, or what is the relation of animal consciousness to personality; but I repeat that the word punishment as applied to an animal only has meaning just so far as you tacitly assume certain personal characteristics; and the lower you go in the scale of animal life, the more totally unmeaning would the word become. It will be felt perhaps that it is possible for man to punish any animal that is capable, and so far as it is capable, of really caring for man. No doubt. But this is only to repeat the same principle in other words. Perhaps the root of personality is capacity of affection. At all events, to say that punishment is possible in proportion to capacity of affection is to make it correlative to a personal possibility.

Now directly we set all this in the forefront of our thought about punishment, the question begins to present itself more forcibly than ever, whether we can simply acquiesce in the statement with which we began. If punishment is, in its real truth, an operation of righteousness, which is personal, dealing with moral personality, can it be anything like an adequate statement of the truth to say that punishment has exclusive reference to the past? or that pain, as pain, is in itself

an object? or that there is any real equation between the pain, as pain, and the evil to which it relates?

There is always a certain verbal inexactness whenever we speak of the punishment of sin. It is the sinner who is punished, not the sin. So long as men think chiefly of punishment as the punishment of sin, the simply retributive and equational aspect may seem to be the prominent one. The amount of hurt inflicted is the simple expression, and measure, of the necessary antithesis of righteousness against unrighteousness. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, is a maxim which explains itself, with mathematical precision and clearness. But directly you begin to substitute the idea of punishing the sinner, the equation aspect ceases to be the dominant one. It gives place more and more to the thought of that moral purpose towards the sinner, of which the severity of punishment, the severity of the manifested antithesis against unrighteousness, is itself a necessary stage and part.

It is true that punishment still takes the form of pain. But if pain is in any sense an immediate object, must it not be in an operation of personal righteousness upon moral personality,—that the pain is of the nature of a means to an end ?-a moral means working to a moral end? And must not the true character and meaning of the punishment be found in the moral end to which it is a means?

We are going now some way from Dr Dale; and may perhaps easily be tempted to state, with too much breadth, the opposing view. But to say the very least, has not room-full room-to be made for this conception of punishment? Turn for a few minutes to the thought exclusively of human punishment-the punishment of man by man. Is it not plain that we should have to exclude from the word "punishment" a very large