order will go to pieces. And as we have attempted scarcely any criminal reform without punishment—and none till the day before yesterday—the contention is accepted as true for lack of witnesses against it.
The standpoint toward human nature of our generally accepted "moral code" is that of a devout believer in corporal punishment—of that kind of parent who says: "I have to flog my boy because he is so untruthful." And the idea that the untruthfulness is the product of the corporal punishment never enters the parental mind.
But this vengeful exercise of parental authority is only a secondary symptom of belief in a vengeful order of Creation—of a God whose method it was to vindicate the moral law, not by bringing home to ill-doers through natural consequences the defects of certain courses of conduct, but by expressing His moral indignation in exemplary punishments of an arbitrary kind—generally of a miraculous character.
When man first conceived of God, he conceived of Him as a sort of Dr. Busby—one in whose mind the Rod was the beginning and end of wisdom; and the Rod of Heaven operated by intervention, over and above the operations of Nature—the law of cause and effect. Natural consequences did not sufficiently vindicate divine justice. A belief in miraculous and vengeful intervention and a belief in "exemplary" legal punishment
