cruel impulses of the savage heart." It is true that it was sometimes perverted to sanction private revenge — a perversion which was rebuked by Christ, who repudiated it as a rule of individual conduct. It was never intended to legalize hatred, and taking the law into one's own hands. The Old Testament, as well as the New, required a spirit of forgiveness: "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart; thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."[1]
The only sense in which retaliation was authorized, was as a maxim of law, which helped to fix the measure of punishment for crime. As such it is the first impulse of rude, primitive justice; and it was the mode of punishment which was at once the simplest, the most natural, and the most easily administered. Indeed in many cases it was the only mode possible. How would our modern reformers punish such offences? By putting the malefactor in prison? But where was the prison on the desert? The penalty of imprisonment was unknown among the Hebrews in the time of Moses. Twice a man is said to have been "put in ward" until the Divine sentence could be declared. But except the prison in which Joseph was confined in Egypt, we do not read of such a thing until the period of the Jewish kings. On the desert the only possible penalty was one which could be inflicted on the person of the offender, and here the principle of strict retaliation for the crime committed, rigid as it may seem, was perfectly just. It was right that he who inflicted a wound upon his neighbor should feel himself how sharp and keen a wound may be; that he who ferociously tore his brother's eye from its socket, should forfeit his own.
It is worthy of note that the same law was adopted by
- ↑ Lev. xix. 17, 18.
