(for had that been His will, He ought to have been silent), but that He might by fear make them better, and so quiet His wrath: so also hath He appointed a punishment for those who wantonly assail the eyes of others, that if good principle dispose them not to refrain from such cruelty, fear may restrain them from injuring their neighbors’ sight.
“And if this be cruelty, it is cruelty also for the murderer to be restrained, and the adulterer checked. But these are the sayings of senseless men, and of those that are mad to the extreme of madness. For I, so far from saying that this comes of cruelly, should say that the contrary to this would be unlawful, according to men’s reckoning. And whereas thou sayest, ‘Because He commanded to pluck out an eye for an eye, therefore He is cruel’; I say that if He had not given this commandment, then He would have seemed, in the judgment of most men, to be that which thou sayest He is.”
Chrysostom clearly recognized the law, An eye for an eye, as divine, and the contrary of that law, that is, the doctrine of Jesus, Resist not evil, as an iniquity. “For let us suppose,” says Chrysostom further:—
“For let us suppose that this law had been altogether done away, and that no one feared the punishment ensuing thereupon, but that license had been given to all the wicked to follow their own dispositions in all security, to adulterers, and to murderers, to perjured persons, and to parricides; would not all things have been turned upside down? would
