Editorial January 9, 1904 Issue

Christ and the Evildoer

A well-known judge has recently said, "I do not believe in putting people to death for any crime. They should be properly confined so they can hurt no one. If a man lives after death, by putting him to death we only transfer him to another state of existence. May he not be just as mischievous there as he was here? That may be an amusing suggestion, but it is logical. What right have we to put him into this other existence?"

This strong word from a judicial authority is one of many evidences of a very great change in the eschatology of the general thought. Though it still has a place in much theological statement, the idea that death settles any problem is rapidly passing. Men now see that the mere ending of so-called bodily life can have nothing to do with the acquirement of character, no determinative relation to humanity's loves and hates, and hence that while the suicide may jump out of this arena of experience, he finds thereby no escape from himself, from duty, from the law of being, or from God.

The consideration shown by the judge for those into whose presence capital punishment may transfer the criminal, is rather new, but if it is wrong for one nation to transport its undesirables to the domain of another, thus selfishly freeing itself from a problem which its own unrighteous conditions may have begotten then it must be wrong for us to free ourselves of difficulties by flinging them bodily into a future state. So-called Christian peoples are constantly taking the lives of criminals, and yet Christian sentiment stands for a gospel of healing and reformation which makes it impossible for us to think that Jesus or his disciples would have entertained a thought of treating the culpable and the degraded in this way. This so-called short cut out of a difficulty finds, with many another, no approving consent in the teaching of our Great Exemplar, and it could not, for the reason that it is a practical denial of the power of Truth and Love to save and redeem humanity from its every low state and condition. Among the momentous facts which have made the hill of Calvary the highest summit of history, is this: that there, in the hour of agony, Jesus discovered in one of the malefactors whom men had condemned to a dreadful death, a heart so responsive to divine Love as to make it possible for the suffering Master to utter those memorable words: "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise."

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