cowardice or courage? This alone is sufficient to show the impolicy of inflicting the highest punishment on smaller crimes, for the frequent repetition of it renders the mind callous to fear. Need we wonder that when we daily see so many go with a firm tread and an unchanging eye to execution, that man should lose all fear of it? Man, we think, does not naturally fear death,—having the certainty of death always before his eyes; seeing his friends, his relatives, drop one after another into the grave; forgetting, neglecting, nay, laughing at every religious feeling, as man in these cases generally does, he grows gradually accustomed to the thoughts of death, at last divests it of all its terrors; and hence alone will not fear to increase the chance one in a hundred of his dying within a certain time, by stealing, to gain some important end. What serves to preach to men like this on eternity? they have no religious feeling, and they are not capable of imagining any other state than the present for the future. Conscious that eternity has already begun its reign, that they are under the wings of that monster, whose extremities are hid in the interminable abyss of night, capable from the degradation of their minds, of imagining no different state from the present, they will not grieve to part from their friends, for they must know, that the few years they may survive, will be but as the passing of a cloud before the firmament, and that when it has flitted from their gaze, their friends, if friends they can have, will be joined to them for an immortality.
Besides, it is not the intenseness of punishment that most influences our mind; it is the continued impression that fixes itself most indelibly on our thoughts. The dreadful but passing spectacle of death, has little effect upon our ideas: its greatness does not make up for the ease with which we accustom ourselves to dismiss all painful sensations from our memory. Besides, such is the nature of man,
