If Dr. Parkhurst will read his New Testament more understandingly he will observe that Christ’s kindly feeling to transgressors was not to be counted on by sinners of every kind, and it was not always in evidence; for example, when he flogged the moneychangers out of the temple. Nor is Dr. Parkhurst himself any too amiably disposed toward the children of darkness. It was not by mild words and gentle means that he hurled the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. Such revolutions as he set afoot are not made with spiritual rosewater; there must be the contagion of a noble indignation fueled with harder wood than abstractions. The people can not be mustered and incited to action by the spectacle of a man fighting something that does not fight back. It was men that Dr. Parkhurst was trouncing—not their crimes—not Crime. He may fancy himself “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,” but in reality he does not hate hate but hates the hateful, and scorns, not scorn but the scornworthy.
It is singular with what tenacity this amusing though mischievous superstition keeps its hold upon the human mind—this grave, bona fide personification of abstractions and the funny delusion that it is possible to hate or love them. Sin is not a thing; there is no existing object corresponding to any of the mere counter-words that are properly named abstract nouns. One can no more hate sin or love virtue than one can hate a vacuum (which Nature—itself imaginary—was once by the scientists of the period solemnly held to do) or love one of the three dimensions. We may think that while loving a sinner we hate the sin, but that is not so; if anything is hated it is other sinners of the same kind, who are not quite so close to us.
The French have a saying to the effect that to know all is to pardon all; and doubtless with an omniscient insight into the causes of character we should find the field of moral responsibility pretty thickly strewn with extenuating circumstances very suitable indeed for consideration by a god who has had a hand in besetting “with pitfall and with gin” the road we are to “wander in.” But I submit that universal forgiveness would hardly do as a working principle. Even those who are most apt and facile with the incident of the woman taken in adultery commonly cherish a secret respect for the doctrine of eternal damnation; and some of them are known to pin their faith to the penal code of their state. Moreover, there is some reason to believe that the sinning woman, being “taken,” was penitent—they usually are when found out.
“But,” says Citizen Goodheart, who thinks with difficulty, “shall I throw over my friend when he is ‘in trouble’?” Yes, when convinced that he deserves to be in trouble; throw him all the harder and the further because he is your friend. In addition to his particular offense against society he has disgraced you. If there are to be lenity and charity let them go to the criminal who has foreborne to involve you in his shame. It were a pretty state of affairs if an undetected scamp, fearing exposure, could make you a co-defendant by so easy a precaution as securing your acquaintance and regard. Don’t throw the first stone, of course, but when convinced that your friend is a proper target, heave away with a right hearty good-will, and let the stone be of serviceable weight and delivered with a good aim.
I care nothing for principles—they are lumber and rubbish. What concerns our happiness and welfare, as affectable by our fellowmen, is conduct. “Principles, not men,” is a rogue’s cry; rascality’s counsel to stupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe. He shouts it most loudly and with the keenest sense of its advantage who most desires inattention to his own conduct, or to that forecast of it, his character. As to sin, that has an abundance of expounders and is already universally known to be wicked. What more can be said against it, and why go on repeating that? The thing is a trifle wordworn, whereas the sinner cometh up as a flower every day, fresh, ingenuous and inviting. Sin is not at all dangerous to society; what does all the mischief is the sinner. Crime has no arms to thrust into the public treasury and the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wreck a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack an isosceles triangle, or Hume’s “phantasm floating in a void.” My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch, a head for my cudgel—something that can smart and ache. I have no quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know they are all good citizens.
ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS—AN INSTANCE
NO series of connected and consecutive military events has been so closely analyzed by military students as those marking the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. All expounders of the military art who have had the good fortune to live since its principles were so wonderfully illustrated by that campaign have delighted to use its incidents in exposition. Every student has early learned that he could not afford to neglect it. Even to the “general reader,” unacquainted with the mysteries of strategy and tactics, who in the darkness of his ignorance cherishes the error that war is fortuitous fighting loosely directed to results by physical courage and the will of God, the history of these brilliant operations can hardly fail, when lucidly related, to prove interesting and charming beyond the power of fiction. As related by the mere “historian,” with his port-fire and blood-fumes to emotionalize the situation, it is doubtless as dull reading as the literature of the heart generally. What, in brief, was this remarkable campaign?
In the month of March, 1796, Bonaparte, a boy of twenty-six, untried in independent command, was intrusted with an army of some forty thousand badly clad and inadequately supplied men, with which to invade Italy. He was opposed by Beaulieu, with a well equipped force, Austrians and Sardinians, of fifty thousand. The Alps and Apennines were between. Bonaparte began active operations on the eleventh day of April, 1796. On the seventh day of April, 1797, at Leoben, near Vienna, he received the Austrian Emperor’s emissaries, who came to sue for peace, and the war was at an end. During this period of one year less four days, with forces averaging forty-six thousand opposed to forces averaging sixty-one thousand he had in fifteen pitched battles routed one Sardinian army and the six Austrian armies successively sent to drive him out of Italy, only to be driven out themselves. His losses during the campaign in killed, wounded and prisoners were about equal to the numbers of his army at the outset. The losses that he inflicted upon the enemy were no fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand men and vast quantities of material.
How were these astonishing feats of arms performed? Not by the superior courage of his soldiers, for the Austrians then, as they are now, were a brave and warlike people. Not by the “will of God,” whose agency is to the military eye nowhere discernible, and whose political predilections are still unknown. Nor were these admirable results due to “luck,” the “favors of fortune,” the “magic” of genius. They were brought about by the very commonplace method of knowing his business thoroughly and applying the knowledge. There is nothing miraculous in that. It is an open secret which Napoleon himself has explained: