sideration, that these persons' strange dislike
proceeds from their not believing sufficiently that man is made in the
image of God. And, alas! it proceeds, I fear, in some of them, from not
believing in a God at all--believing, perhaps, in some mere maker of the
world, but not in the living God which Scripture sets forth. For how
else can they say, as I have known some say, that capital punishment is
wrong, because "we have no right to usher a man into the presence of his
Maker."

Into the presence of his Maker! Why, where else is every man, you and I,
heathen and Christian, bad and good, save in the presence of his Maker
already? Do we not live and move and have our being in God? Whither can
we go from His spirit, or whither can we flee from His presence? If we
ascend into heaven, He is there. If we go down to hell He is there also.
And if the law puts a man to death, it does not usher him into the
presence of his Maker, for he is there already. It simply says to him,
"God has judged you on earth, not we. God will judge you in the next
world, not we. All we know is, that you are not fit to live in this
world. All our duty is to send you out of it. Where you will go in the
other world is God's matter, not ours, and the Lord have mercy on your
soul."

And this want of faith in a living God lies at the bottom of another
objection. We are to keep murderers alive in order to convert and
instruct and amend them. The answer is, We shall be most happy to amend
anybody of any fault, however great: but the experience of ages is that
murderers are past mending; that the fact of a man's murdering another is
a plain proof that he has no moral sense, and has become simply a brute
animal Our duty is to punish not to amend, and to say to the murderer,
"If you can be amended; God will amend you, and so have mercy on your
soul. God must amend you, if you are to be amended. If God cannot amend
you, we cannot. If God will not amend you, certainly we cannot force Him
to do so, if we kept you alive for a thousand years." That would seem
reasonable, as well as reverent and faithful to God. But men now-a-days
fancy that they love their fellow creatures far better than God loves
them, and can deal far more wisely and lovingly with them than God is
willing to deal. Of these objections I take little heed. I look on them
as merely loose cant, which does not quite understand the meaning of i