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visitings of the grace of God are withdrawn, and the man has not a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 I must 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 les