Part 4

We have been made very conscious of the burden of the world's pain and sin, though perhaps that burden, as God bears it, is no heavier now than in our selfish and worldly peace. Will the Church pray to Him, "Save Thyself and us"? or will it willingly suffer with Him, united with Him in the intimacy of penitence, seeing His royalty in His crown of thorns? Will it, while bidding men bravely do their duty as they see it, still say that the real treasures are not of this world though they may in part be possessed here, suffering whatever may be the penalty for this unpopular testimony? For the kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ only when the citizens of those kingdoms lay up their treasure in heaven and not upon the earth, only when, being risen with Christ, they set their affection on things above--love, joy, peace, loyalty, beauty, knowledge--only when they realise their fellowship in His Body so that their fellowship also in His Holy Spirit may purge their selfishness away.

Here is field enough for heroism and the moral equivalent of war. The Church is to be transformed and become a band of people united in their indifference to personal success or national expansion, and caring only that the individual is pure in heart and the nation honourable. In her zeal for that purity and honour, and in her contempt for all else, she may have to suffer crucifixion. It is a big risk that the Church must run; for if she does not save the world she will have ruined it, besides sacrificing herself. If there is no God nor Holy City of God, the Church will have just spoilt life for all her faithful members, and in some degree for every one else as well. But if her vision is true, then everything is worth while--rather the greatness of the sacrifice is an addition to the joy when the prize is so unimaginably great. Can we bring this spirit into the Church? On our answer depends the course of history in the next century, and a new stage in the Coming of the Lord.

_The Spirit and the Bride say, Come._ _And he that heareth, let him say, Come._ _Yea: I come quickly._ _Amen: come, Lord Jesus._

*LECTURE III*

*JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE STATE*

"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to fulfil."--S. Matthew v., 17.

I.--In the last lecture I said that justice would seem to be the typical virtue of the State, as holiness of the Church. Let us, then, first consider this virtue of justice in the light of our Lord's teaching concerning one of the most familiar aspects of justice--its penal aspect.

Those sayings that have of late given rise to so many searchings of heart among Christians--the sayings about turning the other cheek and the rest--are given by our Lord as explanations of the saying that He came "not to destroy the law but to fulfil it." The words "to fulfil" of course mean not only to obey and carry out, but to complete.

In what sense is this teaching of our Lord the completion of the law? For the law of Moses, like every other law, was concerned with regulating the relations of men to one another, as well as their duties towards God; and it enforced what it enjoined by penalties.

At first sight no doubt it looks as if He were directly contradicting what had been said to them of old time--

"Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not him that is evil; but whosoever smites thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also, and if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also."

How is this the fulfilment or completion of the Mosaic or any other law? At this distance of time, it is hard to remember what was the original significance of the law of retaliation. We are inclined to think that the words "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" are intended to give a licence to that degree of vindictiveness; but on the contrary, in the primitive stage in which that enactment was given, it was not a licence given to man's instinct for vengeance, but a limitation set upon that primitive and animal instinct, whose natural tendency, if unchecked, is to take two eyes for an eye and a set of teeth for a tooth. The _lex talionis_ said--Only an eye for an eye, and only a tooth for a tooth.

Our Lord carries the same principle further; not even that degree of vindictiveness is allowed. The first necessity was to put bounds upon man's natural and almost insatiable lust for vengeance. The next was to tell him that the whole method of vengeance could never succeed in what is its only really justifiable aim. For what is the true function of the law, whether that of Moses or any other? It is always two-fold; it must always aim not merely at checking the evil act, but at converting, if possible, the evil will.

There has never, I suppose, been any legal system which was not justified by its upholders on this ground. No one is really content, to think that the punishment which he inflicts, or may imagine himself as inflicting through the agency of the State, or in any other way, is purely deterrent; he always thinks it will also be reformative. But, how are you as a matter of fact to attack the evil will? The mere infliction of penalty will not of any necessity achieve this goal at all. We know that it is very seriously debated whether our whole system of punishment in the civilised States of to-day has any really moral effect, at least upon those who fall under its most severe penalties. Probably most convicts leave prison worse men than when they entered. For if a man is below a certain level in moral attainment, pain, far from purifying, only brutalises and coarsens. It is only those who are already far in the path of spiritual growth who are purified by suffering, even as the Captain of our Salvation was thus made perfect. But it is still true that the aim of all penal law is twofold; to check the evil act and, if possible, to convert the evil will.

Now, as I suggested previously, mere restraint may have indirectly a positive moral value; as for example in the case of a child, who is potentially of very diverse characters. He has the capacity to grow in many different directions, and it will depend very much upon his surroundings, and the influences which play upon his character, whether this set of instincts or that receives development; and here merely to keep forcibly within bounds the development of certain impulses, which tend to grow out of proportion to the proper harmony and economy of nature, may indirectly have the effect of preserving that harmony and thus develop genuine virtue in the soul. And again, with those whose characters are relatively formed, the direct restraint, for example, of State action may have positive moral value, inasmuch as it is the expression of the moral judgment of Society. What most of us would shrink from, if we were in danger of imprisonment, would not be the physical inconvenience, which is not very great, but the fact that we should have brought ourselves under the censure of Society, and acted in such a way as to put ourselves below the level which Society generally considers itself justified in enforcing. And so the purely restraining influence of the State, even operating through force, may have a positive moral value, because it represents, and is the only way at present devised of representing, the judgment of Society, and to shrink from the judgment of Society is, so far as it goes, a really moral fear. It is not indeed the highest ground for the avoidance of evil, but it is a moral ground, for it arises from our recognition of our fellow-membership in Society with those whose censure we fear.

But the State in all its actions is of necessity mechanical, and cannot take account of the individual, and all that makes him what he is. The State officer cannot know the prisoner in such a way as really to determine the treatment allotted to him in the light of what is best for his spiritual welfare; and therefore he has to fall back upon rough and ready rules which will never be perhaps very far from the right treatment, though they may fail to allot the ideal treatment in any single case. And here, in parenthesis, let me just mention that this is the chief reason why metaphors and comparisons drawn from the law-courts are so sadly misleading when used to illustrate the relation between the human soul and God; our only fear of the judge is concerned with what he will do to us; but what we fear with our father, on earth or in Heaven, is not so much what he will do to us, as the pain we have caused--"There is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt Thou be feared."

Our Lord's method is the only one that aims straight at the evil will; it is the only method which has in it any real hope of converting the individual. It may fail time and again; but it is the only one that has a chance of real and absolute success.

Let us look for a moment at the instances which He chooses to illustrate the principle, and we shall see at once that they are carefully chosen. All the acts chosen are such as are particularly vexatious to the ordinary natural and selfish man--being struck in the face; having a vexatious suit brought against one; being pestered by a beggar; being compelled to do something for the public service when we are busy. Those are just the things which the natural man resents and which the real Christian will not mind at all. For, after all, there is no real injury in being struck in the face, or having one's coat taken away. What one minds is the insult to one's precious dignity; and the Christian who, by definition, has forgotten all about himself will not mind such injuries at all. Therefore if the acts commanded are spontaneously done and not done with a laborious conscientiousness--that is to say if they are done in the spirit of Christianity, and not in the spirit of Pharisaism--they will express a complete conversion in the will of him who does them; they will express absolute conquest of self, and a concern solely for the welfare of him with whom we are dealing; and there is no heart yet made that can resist the appeal of love which is constant in spite of every betrayal, the appeal of trust which is renewed in spite of endless disappointments.

"He that loveth his brother"--says St. John--"walketh in the light." He is the man who knows where he is going, because he is the man who understands people and sees into their hearts. They will reveal to him secrets of their nature, which they will hide from the contemptuous and indifferent; and even if at first he is from time to time disappointed and betrayed, in the end his method will succeed, because love and trust create what they believe in.

The justice then, which we find at work in the State, is always a provisional thing pointing us to something more, something which the State itself by its very constitution is unable to provide, but which God provides in Christ, and will enable us in our measure to provide, if we are faithful, at least in the circle of our immediate activities, so far, that is, as the range of our sympathy will carry us.

II.--The value of the justice which the State is able to secure actually resides for the most part in the liberty which it makes possible. Justice, as the State interprets it, is of itself, as far as I can see, almost totally valueless. I can see no kind of advantage in merely allotting so much pain to so much evil. There is moral evil in a man and you put physical evil into him as well. I do not see how you have made him or anyone else the better. Only in so far as the punishment is either deterrent or reformative, has it any moral value at all; and only in the latter case, where it reforms the character, can the value be called in the strict sense moral. So far as it only deters men from evil acts which they would desire to commit, it may add to the convenience of the other members of Society, but it is not doing any direct moral good.

Indirectly, however, it has moral results; for when we enquire in what sense we can say that such justice as the State secures produces liberty, the first answer is to be found in the obvious and elementary fact that the liberty of every one of us depends upon our knowledge that certain impulses and instincts in other people, should they arise, will be checked and not allowed to receive full expression. Our liberty is increased by that check put upon predatory or homicidal impulses in other people, and their liberty depends upon the suppression of such impulses in us.

So far it would seem that there must be in the most obvious sense of the words a certain curtailment of everybody's liberty in order that anybody may have liberty at all. If we are all to be free to indulge our passions of anger and hatred, should such arise within us, then it is quite clear that there will be very little freedom of action in the Society which rests on that principle. Everyone will go about in fear of everyone else.

But that is a very small part of the business. The chief contribution of such justice to human liberty is that it supplies the necessary conditions of discipline without which there can be no liberty. We think of liberty as meaning freedom from external constraint. We think that an act of ours is free when we can say, "I did it, and no one made me do it"; but very little reflection is sufficient to convince us that a man whose life is actually governed by one or several over-developed passions which he will, as a matter of fact, always gratify when opportunity offers, in spite of the damage that is done to his whole life and to his permanent and deliberate purpose, is not really a free man. To be tied and bound with the chain of our sins is just as much slavery as to be in the ownership of another man; and we can acquire the real liberty which is worth having, the liberty, that is, to shape our lives, to live according to our own purpose, following out our own ideal, only in so far as our natures have been welded by discipline into unity, so that we are no longer a chaos of impulses and instincts, any of which may be set in motion by the appropriate environment, but are self-governing persons controlling our own lives.

Liberty, in so far as it is of any value, always means self-control in both the senses of that term: in the sense that we are only controlled by ourselves, and also in the sense that by ourselves we are controlled, and that every part of our nature is subservient to the purpose to which our whole nature is given. Legislation is really an instrument of self-discipline. The people who write books about political philosophy are mainly members of the respectable classes. They naturally find it rather difficult to envisage themselves as liable to commit murder and the like; and they are therefore very liable to represent the criminal law of the State as being enacted against a few undisciplined or recalcitrant members. But when we look at the thing more closely, we see that what a community does, especially a democratic community, when it passes a law, is to invoke, every member upon his own head, the penalties enacted by that law, if he should do the act which the law forbids.

Let us consider, for example, an international convention. What is the use of nations agreeing with one another not to do something, for instance not to poison wells, unless there is some chance that in a moment of strong temptation they may desire to do it? They therefore strengthen their deliberate purpose to avoid such acts by entering into an agreement with one another always to avoid them. There would be no object in doing this unless they needed help, or thought that they might at some time need help, in living up to their own purposes.

And we have to remember that in this way the law of the State is, as a matter of fact, perpetually operating upon every one of us. We are often liable to suppose that it is only active in relation to those people against whom it is definitely set in motion; but it does operate in the life of every one of the citizens of a community; because the fact that certain actions would involve us in State-penalty most undoubtedly does keep all of us from indulging in those actions at certain times, even though at calm moments we recognise that it would be wrong to do so. Trivial instances are nearly always the clearest. Most of us, I suppose, are sufficiently honest to desire in general terms to pay for what we buy; and we should perhaps usually pay for our places in the train, even if there were no ticket-inspector; still, the existence of the inspector just clinches the matter.[#] The possibility of the penalty as a matter of fact helps to maintain our general, permanent, and deliberate purpose of honesty against a momentary temptation to be dishonest; and so far it is helping us to live up to our purpose, or, in other words, is increasing our real freedom. In fact, one main test of good legislation is precisely whether it does or does not in this way develop real freedom by increasing people's power to live by their own deliberate purpose.

[#] I owe the illustration to Mr. A. L. Smith, of Balliol.

Now so far we have been considering Society as consisting of relatively free persons (though the freedom exists in varying degrees, both as regards the external constraint and capacity for self-control), these persons having various claims which have to be regulated by the justice which the State upholds; in other words, in this stage, we are regarding justice in the way in which I suppose it is most usually regarded, namely, as rendering to a man what is due to him. That is the definition with which Plato in _The Republic_ starts his enquiry, and he naturally found very soon that it would not work.[#] It will not work because the moral values of people are not determinable. You cannot, as a matter of fact, ever say what is the relative weight of the various claims that may be made on behalf of this or that man. Most particularly there is the perpetual conflict between the actual and the potential worth of any men.

[#] He appropriately puts it in the mouth of Polemarchus, the well-brought up, but wholly inexperienced, young man.

Suppose that we decide that we will give to all men in Society that which is their due. How are we going to determine what is due? Is it to be determined by their economic value, for example by the amount they are contributing to the economic or general welfare of Society? Well then, there are a large number of people at both ends of what we call the social scale who ought to receive nothing at all, because they are contributing nothing economically, or, indeed, in any other way, to the public welfare. And yet that is not their fault; they have been brought up, it may be in squalor, it may be in luxury, but in either case in circumstances which have made them almost incapable of anything like good citizenship. Are we to kill such persons, or leave them to starve, in the interest of the public welfare? All human instincts will protest that this is unjust, and that they can claim more than they can possibly be represented as contributing, simply because they have had, as we say, bad luck, and it is not their fault.[#]

[#] See Appendix III, _On Justice and Education_.

Let us try what happens if after Plato's example we turn the matter upside down, and instead of saying that justice will be found when there is rendered to each man what is due to him, we say that justice is found when each man contributes what is due from him.

Now logically, of course, these two are the same, because duties and rights are absolutely correlative. My rights constitute other people's duties towards me, and their rights constitute my duties towards them. The only difference is that it is far more easy in any given case to determine what is due from somebody--what can be claimed from him--than to determine what is due to him.

In this imperfect stage of the world, where we are passing through the transition from something like barbarism to Christian civilisation, as we hope, it is possible that of two correlative processes, one will actually carry us further than the other even though it is logically inseparable from it. And in fact we find at once, that if we put it this way, and say that the principle of justice is not that each man should obtain what is due to him, but that each should contribute what is due from him, we are coming to the central principle of God's administration of His world, which is that we should render to every man not according to his desert, but according to his need. Indeed for practical purposes, if we are wishing to bring justice into our own dealings, and into the dealings of any public body with which we may have influence, this principle will carry us further than any other--"Render to every man according to his need."

Let us suppose that we meet on one day with two beggars. One of them is a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work. All of us of course will say--"He deserves help and we will help him." Yes; and it is quite easy to help him. We have only to set him up again, and all will be well. It is not his own fault and we can rely upon him to make use of another opportunity. The other beggar is a man who has lost this place, as he has lost many before, through indulgence in some vice, such as drink. There are very many people who will say, "Well, it is his own fault, and now he must suffer for it." If God had taken that line with us, where would our redemption be?--"It is his own fault, now he must suffer for it." To say that is to repudiate the Gospel in its entirety. It is to call the Cross absurd and scandalous. "God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died."

No; the Christian will say, "This man needs help more than the other." It will not be the same kind of help. It is no use merely to give him money. That may merely help him to go wrong quicker than he would otherwise. He needs something that will cost us, probably, more than money; he needs our time--time to make friends; time to remove his suspicions; time to enter into real sympathy with him, and to detect what elements of strength there are in his character, that we may build them up again. But he needs help more than the other, and the Christian will be bound to give it, and he will say--"It was his own fault; he cannot help himself; it depends entirely on us; we will render to him according to his need."

And all of this would lead to another formula for describing the justice which we shall desire to practise in the State, and in all our secular life of which the State is the highest organisation--The recognition of personality.