as inexorable as fact itself. It
will not punish him: it will not take his money. It will not tolerate a
redeemed ruffian: it leaves him no means of salvation except ceasing to
be a ruffian. In doing this, the Salvation Army instinctively grasps
the central truth of Christianity and discards its central
superstition: that central truth being the vanity of revenge and
punishment, and that central superstition the salvation of the world by
the gibbet.

For, be it noted, Bill has assaulted an old and starving woman also;
and for this worse offence he feels no remorse whatever, because she
makes it clear that her malice is as great as his own. "Let her have
the law of me, as she said she would," says Bill: "what I done to her
is no more on what you might call my conscience than sticking a pig."
This shows a perfectly natural and wholesome state of mind on his part.
The old woman, like the law she threatens him with, is perfectly ready
to play the game of retaliation with him: to rob him if he steals, to
flog him if he strikes, to murder him if he kills. By example and
precept the law and public opinion teach him to impose his will on
others by anger, violence, and cruelty, and to wipe off the moral score
by punishment. That is sound Crosstianity. But this Crosstianity has
got entangled with something which Barbara calls Christianity, and
which unexpectedly causes her to refuse to play the hangman's game of
Satan casting out Satan. She refuses to prosecute a drunken ruffian;
she converses on equal terms with a blackguard whom no lady could be
seen speaking to in the public street: in short, she behaves as
illegally and unbecomingly as possible under the circumstances. Bill's
conscience reacts to this just as naturally as it does to the old
woman's threats. He is placed in a position of unbearable moral
inferiority, and strives by every means in his power to escape from it,
whilst he is still quite ready to meet the abuse of the old woman by
attempting to smash a mug on her face. And that is the triumphant
justification of Barbara's Christianity as against our system of
judicial punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and "poetic
justice" of the romantic stage.

For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the situation
is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the epic of the
convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the Crosstian policeman
annihilated by his encounter with the Christian Valje