'No.We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon-worship.But surely our tender mercies are cruel.We don't like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows.A weakling pity will petition for the life of the worst murderer--but for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as like their notion of hell as they dare to make it--namely, a place whence all the sweet visitings of the grace of God are withdrawn, and the man has not a chance, so to speak, of growing better.In this hell of theirs they will even pamper his beastly body.'
'They have the chaplain to visit them.'
'I pity the chaplain, cut off in his labours from all the aids which God's world alone can give for the teaching of these men.Human beings have not the right to inflict such cruel punishment upon their fellow-man.It springs from a cowardly shrinking from responsibility, and from mistrust of the mercy of God;--perhaps first of all from an over-valuing of the mere life of the body.
Hanging is tenderness itself to such a punishment.'
'I think you are hardly fair, though, Falconer.It is the fear of sending them to hell that prevents them from hanging them.'
'Yes.You are right, I dare say.They are not of David's mind, who would rather fall into the hands of God than of men.They think their hell is not so hard as his, and may be better for them.But Imust not, as you say, forget that they do believe their everlasting fate hangs upon their hands, for if God once gets his hold of them by death, they are lost for ever.'
'But the chaplain may awake them to a sense of their sins.'
'I do not think it is likely that talk will do what the discipline of life has not done.It seems to me, on the contrary, that the clergyman has no commission to rouse people to a sense of their sins.That is not his work.He is far more likely to harden them by any attempt in that direction.Every man does feel his sins, though he often does not know it.To turn his attention away from what he does feel by trying to rouse in him feelings which are impossible to him in his present condition, is to do him a great wrong.The clergyman has the message of salvation, not of sin, to give.Whatever oppression is on a man, whatever trouble, whatever conscious something that comes between him and the blessedness of life, is his sin; for whatever is not of faith is sin; and from all this He came to save us.Salvation alone can rouse in us a sense of our sinfulness.One must have got on a good way before he can be sorry for his sins.There is no condition of sorrow laid down as necessary to forgiveness.Repentance does not mean sorrow: it means turning away from the sins.Every man can do that, more or less.
And that every man must do.The sorrow will come afterwards, all in good time.Jesus offers to take us out of our own hands into his, if we will only obey him.'
The eyes of the old man were fixed on his son as he spoke, He did seem to be thinking.I could almost fancy that a glimmer of something like hope shone in his eyes.
It was time to go home, and we were nearly silent all the way.
The next morning was so wet that we could not go out, and had to amuse ourselves as we best might in-doors.But Falconer's resources never failed.He gave us this day story after story about the poor people he had known.I could see that his object was often to get some truth into his father's mind without exposing it to rejection by addressing it directly to himself; and few subjects could be more fitted for affording such opportunity than his experiences among the poor.
The afternoon was still rainy and misty.In the evening I sought to lead the conversation towards the gospel-story; and then Falconer talked as I never heard him talk before.No little circumstance in the narratives appeared to have escaped him.He had thought about everything, as it seemed to me.He had looked under the surface everywhere, and found truth--mines of it--under all the upper soil of the story.The deeper he dug the richer seemed the ore.This was combined with the most pictorial apprehension of every outward event, which he treated as if it had been described to him by the lips of an eye-witness.The whole thing lived in his words and thoughts.
'When anything looks strange, you must look the deeper,' he would say.
At the close of one of our fits of talk, he rose and went to the window.
'Come here,' he said, after looking for a moment.