saner views. It is, of course, merely a systematisation of brute passion. In the beginning, if a man knocked your tooth out, you knocked one of his teeth out. With the growth of law and justice, the barbarous nature of the impulse was recognised, and the community, by its representatives, inflicted a "punishment" on the offender instead of allowing the offended to retaliate. With the modern improvement of moral sentiments we have realised that this is an imperfect advance on the barbaric idea. The community has no more right to "punish" than the offended individual had. We now impose hardship on an offender only for the purpose of intimidating him from repeating the offence, or of deterring others from offending. The idea is still somewhat crude, and a third stage will in time be reached; but it is satisfactory that we now—not since the advent of Christianity, but since the rise of modern humanism—all admit that the only permissible procedure is deterrence, and not punishment as such.
It may seem ungracious to be ever repeating that these improvements did not take place during the period of Christian influence, but in the recent period of its decay. There is, however, in this case a most important and urgent reason for emphasising the fact. I say that we all admit the more humane conception of punishment, but this must be qualified. In human affairs we do: Carlyle was, perhaps, the last moralist to cling to the old conception. But in the religious world the old idea has been flagrantly retained. The doctrine of eternal punishment is clearly based on the barbaric old idea that a prince whose dignity has been insulted may justly inflict the most barbarous punishment on the offender. Theologians have, since the
