the modern conscience and with a sense of justice and proportion, it
ceases to be that monstrous cloud which darkened the whole vision of
the mediaeval theologian. Man has been more harsh with himself than an
all-merciful God will ever be. It is true that with all deductions
there remains a great residuum which means want of individual effort,
conscious weakness of will, and culpable failure of character when the
sinner, like Horace, sees and applauds the higher while he follows the
lower. But when, on the other hand, one has made allowances--and can
our human allowance be as generous as God's?--for the sins which are
the inevitable product of early environment, for the sins which are due
to hereditary and inborn taint, and to the sins which are due to clear
physical causes, then the total of active sin is greatly reduced.
Could one, for example, imagine that Providence, all-wise and
all-merciful, as every creed proclaims, could punish the unfortunate
wretch who hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a
criminal head? A doctor has but to glance at the cranium to predicate
the crime. In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the Ripper,
is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross national sins to
which allusion has been made seem to point to collective national
insanity. Surely, then, there is hope that no very terrible inferno is
needed to further punish those who have been so afflicted upon earth.
Some of our dead have remarked that nothing has surprised them so much
as to find who have been chosen for honour, and certainly, without in
any way condoning sin, one could well imagine that the man whose
organic makeup predisposed him with irresistible force in that
direction should, in justice, receive condolence and sympathy.
Possibly such a sinner, if he had not sinned so deeply as he might have
done, stands higher than the man who was born good, and remained so,
but was no better at the end of his life. The one has made some
progress and the other has not. But the commonest failing, the one
which fills the spiritual hospitals of the other world, and is a
temporary bar to the normal happiness of the after-life, is the sin of
Tomlinson in Kipling's poem, the commonest of all sins in respectable
British circles, the sin of conventionality, of want of conscious
effort and development, of a sluggish spirituality, fatted over by a
complacent mind and by the comforts of life. It is the man wh