would be unlikely to turn out criminals. I do {178} not
see how we can escape the conclusion that the saner penology of the
present has completely undermined the whole juristic basis of the next
world. Human ethics and a supernatural ethics of an eschatological
sort cannot be dovetailed together. The scene and motives of a crime
cannot be laid in one world with that world's peculiar conditions, and
the punishment dispensed in another. And a final punishment is a
veritable absurdity. Is punishment an end in itself? Are the wicked
such hopeless creatures? Or does it simply mean that men have never
before thought of such things as indeterminate sentences and
reformation? Prisoners were hustled away and never seen afterwards.
Punishment and reward were easy matters in the old days when justice
was external and terroristic; we see to-day that they are the most
difficult of problems. Final judgments by omniscient judges strike us
as romantic and even melodramatic. Again, we doubt such facile
divisions of our mixed humanity as that between saints and sinners. We
have a keener and more democratic eye for the good in the most
unprepossessing of our fellow creatures. We know what he has been up
against from his babyhood days, what his chances, temptations, joys and
sorrows have been. And we have the deep conviction that ghostly
judgment after death would be absolutely meaningless.

In an earlier chapter, we pointed out that the belief in, and desire
for, immortality is stronger in periods of social disorganization than
in periods of marked social unity and happy creativeness. Christianity
arose in just such a time of pessimism and stifled social life. The
Roman Empire had become barren of joyous hopefulness and spirited
endeavor. The citizen was only a {179} unit in a dreary and monotonous
whole ruled from above. All through the Middle Ages, something of this
suspicion of the world, this longing for release from earthly things
tinged the interests and judgments of the more spiritually-minded men
and women. The inevitable ethical result was a disregard of genuine
human problems and a tense exaltation of attitudes of self-control and
negation. Disciplines became ends in themselves, which rejected all
relation to the life of every day. The direction of ethical life was
away from creative activity and concern with the more homely things,
and toward an abstract contemplation of ideals seldom put to the test
of pos