were persecuted in the name of truth and virtue; they
triumphed. The Puritans in turn persecuted, under the impulse of
ideals that an impartial judgment must pronounce among the loftiest and
noblest that ever animated human hearts, and in turn they were
overthrown. Again and again, when crime has attained monstrous and
threatening proportions, laws of barbarous severity have been applied
for its repression; in not one solitary instance have they been
successful. The more barbarous and severe the law against crime, the
more has crime flourished. When men were hanged for petty theft, when
they were whipped at the cart's tail for seditious language, when they
were disembowelled for treasonable practices; theft, sedition, and
treason flourished as they have never flourished since. The very
disproportion and hideousness of the penalty inflamed men's minds to
the commission of wrong. On the contrary, the birth of lenience and
humanity was immediately rewarded by a decline of crime. These are
lessons which we do well to recollect to-day when statesmen advocate
the death penalty for the anarchist, irrespective of his exact crime;
when city councils propose the same penalty for those guilty of
outrages on women; when indignant mobs, in spite of law, and without
trial, burn at the stake offending negroes. If history teaches
anything with an emphasis at once clear and unmistakable, it is that
crime has never yet been abridged by brutal harshness, but has thriven
on it. History also teaches with an emphasis equally clear and
positive, that the spirit of love, manifesting itself in lenience,
compassion, and magnanimity, has constantly justified itself by the
reduction of crime, and the taming of the worst kind of criminal.

Is not this in itself a justification of the spirit of Jesus? Does it
not appear, on the review of nearly two thousand years of history, that
society has attained its greatest happiness and has reached its highest
condition of virtue, precisely in those periods when the gentle ideals
of Jesus have had most sway over human thought and action? And if this
be so, is it possible to doubt that society will only continue to
progress towards happiness and content in the degree that it obeys the
counsels of Jesus, making not force but love the great social dynamic,
which shall control all its operations and guide all its judgments?

It may appear impossible and inexpedient for the human judge to say to
the o