nd
Fact do _not_ love him? If they have set inexorable penalties upon
him, and planted natural wrath against him in every god-created human
heart,--then I advise you, cease, and change your hand.

Reward and punishment? Alas, alas, I must say you reward and punish
pretty much alike! Your dignities, peerages, promotions, your kingships,
your brazen statues erected in capital and county towns to our select
demigods of your selecting, testify loudly enough what kind of
heroes and hero-worshippers you are. Woe to the People that no longer
venerates, as the emblem of God himself, the aspect of Human Worth; that
no longer knows what human worth and unworth is! Sure as the Decrees of
the Eternal, that People cannot come to good. By a course too clear,
by a necessity too evident, that People will come into the hands of the
unworthy; and either turn on its bad career, or stagger downwards to
ruin and abolition. Does the Hebrew People prophetically sing "Ou'
clo'!" in all thoroughfares, these eighteen hundred years in vain?

To reward men according to their worth: alas, the perfection of this,
we know, amounts to the millennium! Neither is perfect punishment,
according to the like rule, to be attained,--nor even, by a legislator
of these chaotic days, to be too zealously attempted. But when he does
attempt it,--yes, when he summons out the Society to sit deliberative on
this matter, and consult the oracles upon it, and solemnly settle it in
the name of God; then, if never before, he should try to be a little
in the right in settling it!--In regard to reward of merit, I do not
bethink me of any attempt whatever, worth calling an attempt, on the
part of modern Governments; which surely is an immense oversight on
their part, and will one day be seen to have been an altogether fatal
one. But as to the punishment of crime, happily this cannot be quite
neglected. When men have a purse and a skin, they seek salvation at
least for these; and the Four Pleas of the Crown are a thing that
must and will be attended to. By punishment, capital or other, by
treadmilling and blind rigor, or by whitewashing and blind laxity, the
extremely disagreeable offences of theft and murder must be kept down
within limits.

And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and hang
them on gibbets "for an example to deter others." Whereupon arise
friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason, as I consider,
if your hypothesis be corre