which despitefully use you and persecute you." And then the reason, the key to it all:—"That ye may be children of your Father which is in Heaven, for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect."
The Sermon on the Mount, which threw over the doctrine of punishment on earth, threw over with equal emphasis the doctrine of punishment in Heaven—of any arbitrary or miraculous intervention for the betterment (to moral ends) of the law of natural consequences.
"Be ye the children of Creation!" is the real human solution—not by harking back (as opponents would pretend) to the savagery of a lower species, but by accepting the spiritualising impulse of evolutionary forces—which have brought us to this great development from the mentality of the lower animal world—the knowledge that we are all part of one whole.
And it is on that recognition of an underlying unity (from which we are inseparable) that the great natural revolution of our ideas about crime and punishment must be brought about. If we cling to the violent and the arbitrary, and the separative solution (of which miraculous retribution is the corollary) we are in the Dark Ages still.
It must have been the experience of many
