lieve of human love, when it is called
by duty to chastise unrighteousness. I do not suppose that John
Stuart Mill was actuated by hatred of Palmer or Pritchard or any
other famous malefactor of his time when he said that there are some
people so bad that they "ought to be blotted out of the catalogue
of living men." It was the dispassionate judgment of philosophy
on crime. When the convicted murderer exclaimed, "Don't condemn
me to death; I am not fit to die!" a great Judge replied, "I know
nothing about that; I only know that you are not fit to live"; but
I do not suppose that he hated the wretch in the dock. Even so,
though it may be our duty to love our enemies as our fellow-citizens
in the kingdom of God, we need not shrink, when the time comes, from
being the ministers of that righteous vengeance which, according
to the immutable order of the world, is prepared for impenitent
wrong-doing.

VI

_HATRED AND LOVE_

I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle: "Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other
emotion can do." The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say
nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically
unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it
is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.

However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth
century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and
there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always
recognize. It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and
is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals.
"The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his
old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide
mouth and deep red gullet." Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing
a dog's savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an
exactly similar spirit may be concealed--and not always concealed--in
a human frame. We have lived so long, if not under the domination,
still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally
are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling. Hence the
poignancy of the bitter saying: "I forgive him as a Christian--which
means that I don't forgive him at all." Under a decent, though
hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one
another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imp