CHAPTER IX
WHAT I WOULD RADIATE TO THE WRONG DOER
For two years I was the chaplain for two homes where women who had led evil lives were sheltered and cared for. During part of this time I helped organize and conduct a midnight mission in one of the most degraded parts of a large eastern city. I have had a large and varied acquaintance with criminals of both sexes, of all ages and conditions, and have been the recipient of many strange and startling confidences of men and women whose integrity has never been questioned, and yet who, if their inner life were known, would have been execrated and ostracized.
As a result of these varied experiences and the knowledge that has come to me I am compelled to assert that I believe our present system of treatment of wrong-doers is not only unchristian but unwise and foolish, and that it fosters and cherishes some of the very wrongs we seek to prevent.
The attitude we take—that every evil doer loves his evil doing, sins because he wants to sin, is a criminal for his own pleasure—is absurd and foolish. And what wicked cruelties such an attitude leads us to commit. Socrates saw clearer than that centuries ago when he said: "It is strange that you should not be angry when you meet a man with an ill-conditioned body, and yet be vexed when you encounter one with an ill-conditioned soul!"
Most of us have a lot of maxims or rules that we apply to those wrong-doers who come under our ken, forgetful of the fact that the strange thing about human nature is that it doesn't fit your, or my, or any one's ideas or notions. It cannot be bounded, as you bound a sea or an island. It cannot be plotted or catalogued as you plot a lawn or catalogue a library. The only way you can read men and women is with sympathy and love—sympathy for their failures to measure up to your conceptions of manhood and womanhood; love for the undoubted good that you perceive.
All moral judgments must remain false and hollow that are not checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.
Christ did not in the least abrogate the Seventh Commandment when he said to the woman taken in the act of adultery: "I do not condemn thee. Go and sin no more." In my opinion He wished to teach the lesson that the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of her accusers were also crimes.
All men that are drunkards are not equally culpable, deserving of hell-fire and to be swept there by quoting the Hebrew scriptures: "No drunkard shall inherit eternal life." The special circumstances must be considered, and God only is competent to do this. Whenever I hear these ready quotations, whenever I am tempted to use them in my dealings with my erring fellow-men and women I recall what George Eliot wrote in The Mill on the Floss.
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment safely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality,—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.