The Essentials of Spirituality by Felix Adler (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

private capacity, but that he delivers the judgment of mankind on the doer and the deed, serving as the mouthpiece of the moral law, so far as it is incorporated in the human law. We should select the highest characters available for so exalted a duty, but freedom from even great human infirmity we cannot expect to find. Again, it is not the judge's business to fix the degree of moral guilt; that not even the best and wisest of men can do. The inscrutable fact of the degree of moral guilt eludes all human insight. Only omniscience could decide who is more guilty relatively to opportunities, advantages, circumstances; who has made the braver effort to escape wrongdoing; whether the admired preacher, or the culprit on his way to the gallows; whether the President in the White House or the wretch behind the bars. The office of the judge is to pronounce that crime has been committed, irrespective of the subtle question of the degree of guilt. Murder has been done, property has been stolen, the sin and the sinner wedded together. The office of the judge is to declare the fact of that infelicitous union, and to pronounce the penalty according to the law. And this, in particular. The object of the punishment which the law pronounces is not vindictive chastisement of the culprit. The object of punishment is purely reformatory. Only it must not be forgotten that there can be no reformation without penitence, and no penitence without self-abasement. And this consists in confessing one's self guilty, admitting that the guilt has become a part of one's being, and humbling one's pride to the ground. The public sentence pronounced by the judge, the shame which he fixes upon the culprit, has, then, for its object to pave the way toward reformation, to break down the defenses which the sophistry of wickedness sets up, to compel the man to see himself as others see him, to force him to realize to the full the evil of his present state. Not to blast him utterly, not to exclude him forever from the kindly society of men, but to lead him into the way along which—if he travel it—he may eventually return, though perhaps only after many years, to human fellowship. If the verdict is pronounced in any other spirit, it is false and inhuman. The methods to be employed to bring about reformation must often be severe and painful, and one of these methods is shock, shock sharp and sudden enough to loosen the incrustations of evil habit, and to shake a wicked nature down to its foundations. The purpose of the trial of a criminal in a court of justice, and of the verdict in which the trial culminates, is to supply such a shock, a searching and terrible experience, yet salutary and indispensable in order that better things may ensue.

From what has been said, it follows that the death penalty as a punishment even for the worst crimes is morally untenable; for either the culprit is really irredeemable, that is to say, he is an irresponsible moral idiot, in which case an asylum for the insane is the proper place for him; or he is not irredeemable, in which case the chance of reformation should not be taken from him by cutting off his life. The death penalty is the last lingering vestige of the Lex Talionis, of the law which attempts to equalize the penalty with the crime, a conception of justice which in all other respects we have happily outgrown. It does not necessarily follow that the immediate abolition of capital punishment is expedient. It is not expedient in fact, because of the condition of our prisons, and because of the abuses to which the pardoning power of the State is subjected; because security is lacking that the worst offenders, before ever they can be reclaimed, may not be returned unrepentant into the bosom of society, to prey upon it anew with impunity. But, then, we must not defend the death penalty as such, but rather deplore and do our utmost to change our political conditions, which make it still unwise to abolish a form of punishment so barbarous and so repugnant to the moral sense.

The step which follows the arrest and condemnation of the evildoer is isolation, with a view to the formation of new habits. A change of heart is the necessary pre-requisite of any permanent change in conduct; but the change of heart, and the resolution to turn over a new leaf to which it gives birth, must be gradually and slowly worked out into a corresponding practice. The old body of sin cannot be stripped off in a moment; the old encumbrance of bad habits cannot be sloughed off like a serpent's coil. The new spirit must incorporate itself slowly in new habits; and to this end the delinquent must be aided in his efforts by a more or less prolonged absence from the scene of his former temptations. He must be placed in an entirely new and suitable environment, and encouraging pressure must be exerted upon him to acquire new habits of order, diligent application to work, obedience, self-control. It is upon this idea that the moral propriety of imprisonment and of prison discipline is based, whether the actual treatment of prisoners be in accord with it or not.

And so we may pass on at once to the last and chief element in the process of the reclamation of the evildoer, namely, forgiveness. An angel's tongue, the wisdom and insight of the loftiest of the sages, would be required to describe all the wealth of meaning contained in the sublime spiritual process which we designate by the word pardon. It is a process which affects equally both parties to the act, the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. It exalts both, transfigures both, indeed establishes a new tie of wonderful tenderness and sublimity between them. The person who forgives is a benefactor.

Is it a little thing, when a man is sunk in the slough of poverty, denuded of all the decencies of life, harassed day and night by grinding cares, knows not whither to turn to find shelter and food, for some fellow human being, moved by pure human kindness, or let us rather say moved by respect for the worth which he sees in his perishing fellow-man, to come to the aid of the latter, to lift him out of his distress, to place him on sun-lit levels, to put him on his feet and give him a new chance, to open for him a new career in which effort may meet with its reward? Such an act of human helpfulness is not a little thing; the man who does it is rightly esteemed a great benefactor. Or is it a little thing to save the imperiled sick, to bring back from the brink of the grave a precious life, already despaired of? This, too, surely is not a little thing, and the good physician who accomplishes such a miracle is rightly esteemed a benefactor to whom lifelong gratitude is due.

But there is a yet greater thing, a benefit, by the side of which even these—great as they are—appear almost insignificant. To take a man who is sinking in the moral slough and has no courage left to rise out of it; to give him back his lost self-esteem, that jewel without which health and wealth are of little avail; to put him in a position once more to look his fellow-men straight in the eye; to place him morally on the sun-lit levels; to put him morally on his feet—this assuredly is the supreme benefit, and the man who accomplishes this for another is the supreme benefactor. And a note of exquisite moral beauty is added if the benefactor be the same person whom the guilty man had injured. This is what is meant by forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is so divine a thing. This is the reason why, when an act of genuine forgiveness occurs, "the music of the spheres" seems to become audible in our nether world. And this is also the reason why we often see such a strange kind of tie springing up between a person who has been chastised and the one who has chastised him in the right spirit and then forgiven him—a tie into which there enters shame for the wrong done, gratitude for the unmerited good received, and a reverence akin to idolatry toward the one upon whose faith in him the sinner rebuilt his faith in himself.

There should be some organ of the State to exercise this office of forgiveness toward criminals, this pardoning power in the finer sense of the term. The prison warden, if he be a man of the right stamp, sometimes exercises it. The Society for the Befriending of Released Prisoners has here an appropriate function open to it; also the employer who after due inquiry has the courage to dismiss suspicion and to give work to the released prisoner.

The methods and principles which I have described in the case of the criminal are used for illustration, not that I am interested today in discussing the special problem of the criminal, but because principles can best be exemplified in extreme cases. The same methods, the same maxims should control punishment in general; our dealings, for instance, with the misdeeds of which our own children are guilty. Here, too, there should be by no means unvarying gentleness and pleading, but when need arises the sharp check, that evil may be instantaneously stopped. Here, too, there should be the temporary disgrace, the clear presentation of the magnitude of the fault, if it have magnitude, the humiliation that calls forth penitence and good resolutions. Here, too, there should be sedulous care, to work out the better habits. And all these steps should be taken with a view to ultimate reconciliation, forgiveness, and the holier bond between parent and child.

But now can we take one step further? Can we dispose our minds and our hearts in the same fashion toward oppressors? I have in mind, for instance, the hard proprietors of houses who pitilessly wring the last penny from their tenants; the cruel taskmasters who drive the workers, sometimes only children not yet full-grown, twelve and fifteen hours a day; the unscrupulous exploiters on a large scale, who raise the price of the people's food, and in their eagerness for fabulous gain conspire by every corrupt means to crush their less crafty or less shameless competitors. As we hate wrong, must we not hate them? Shall we assail greed and exploitation merely in the abstract? What effect will that have? Which one of the oppressors will not hypocritically assent to such abstract denunciation? If we seek to produce a change, must we not proceed to more specific allegations and point the finger of scorn at the offenders, saying as the Prophet Nathan said to King David: "Thou art the man"? Is it not necessary to arouse the popular anger against the oppressors and to encourage hatred against the hateful?

Clearly the case is not the same as that of the criminal in the dock. He stands there dishonored; the evil he has done has been brought home to him; he is covered with the garment of shame. But those others are invested—despite the evil they have done and are still doing—with every outward symbol of success; they triumph defiantly over the better moral sense of the community; they inhabit, as it were, impregnable citadels; they have harvested unholy gains which no one seems strong enough to take from them; and the influence they wield in consequence of their power to benefit or harm is immense. Is it a wonder, then, that such oppressors are branded as monsters, and that the hoarse note of some of the Hebrew psalms is sometimes to be heard re-echoing in the cry of the social radicals of our time—Let vengeance be visited upon the wicked; let the oppressors be destroyed from the face of the earth!

But the logical and inevitable conclusion of the thought I have developed to-day is, that we are bound to recognize the indefeasible worth latent even in the cruel exploiter and the merciless expropriator. I have already sufficiently indicated that the spiritual view is consistent with severe and stringent treatment. Checks there should be by the heavy hand of legislation laid upon the arrogant evildoers. They should be stopped if possible in mid-career. The oppressed, also, should oppose those who oppress them. No one is worth his salt who is not willing to defend his rights against those who would trample on them. So far from ruling out conflict, I regard conflict as a weapon of progress—an ethical weapon, if it be waged with the right intentions. Furthermore, when speaking of oppression, I have in mind not merely the cupidity of the few as it operates mercilessly upon the many, but also the banded