, and the community, by its representatives, inflicted a
"punishment" on the offender instead of allowing the offended to
retaliate. With the modern improvement of moral sentiments we have
realised that this is an imperfect advance on the barbaric idea. The
community has no more right to "punish" than the offended individual
had. We now impose hardship on an offender only for the purpose of
intimidating him from repeating the offence, or of deterring others from
offending. The idea is still somewhat crude, and a third stage will in
time be reached; but it is satisfactory that we now--not since the
advent of Christianity, but since the rise of modern humanism--all admit
that the only permissible procedure is deterrence, and not punishment as
such.

It may seem ungracious to be ever repeating that these improvements did
not take place during the period of Christian influence, but in the
recent period of its decay. There is, however, in this case a most
important and urgent reason for emphasising the fact. I say that we
_all_ admit the more humane conception of punishment, but this must be
qualified. In human affairs we do: Carlyle was, perhaps, the last
moralist to cling to the old conception. But in the religious world the
old idea has been flagrantly retained. The doctrine of eternal
punishment is clearly based on the barbaric old idea that a prince whose
dignity has been insulted may justly inflict the most barbarous
punishment on the offender. Theologians have, since the days of Thomas
Aquinas, wasted whole reams of parchment in defending the dogma of hell,
because they knew nothing whatever of comparative jurisprudence and the
evolution of moral ideas. To us the development of the doctrine is
clear. In the Christian doctrine of hell we have a flagrant survival of
the early barbaric theory of punishment. Modern divines--while
continuing to describe the non-religious view of life as "superficial"
and the Christian as "profound"--have actually yielded to the modern
sentiment, and in a very large measure rejected one of the fundamental
dogmas of the Christian tradition. In order to conceal the procedure as
far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ
never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their
uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations of Greek
words.

This does not mean that Christians have lower moral sentiments than
non-Christians, but that the rigi