The Law Passing Away, Not by Destruction But By Fulfillment [pp. 439-445]

Destruction, but by Fulfillnent.
The distinction we have illustrated indicates further the
methods to be employed, if moral requirements, in their aspect
of penal severity, are to pass away from those who are under
bondage to them by reason of transgression. That method is
not to take part with the criminal against the requirement.
It is not to tell him that the law is inhuman and merciless. It
is not to sympathize morbidly with him, as if he were the victim of circumstances and a martyr to civil order. It will not
do to say to the inmates of our prisons, "The law displays a
retaliatory, vindictive spirit to immure you in these dreadful
walls, separating you from your friends and affixing to your
person the badges of dishonor." To say that would but make
the matter a thousand times worse; worse for the criminal, as
well as worse for society. It would encourage him in crime,
and so complete his ruin. What we desire is, that the law
may pass away from the transgressor as an object of dread and
of antipathy. And this is to be effected, not by our destroying
the law, but by his fulfilling it. Offenders must be made to see
the wisdom, reasonableness, safety, and greater satisfaction of
virtuous citizenship, and to surrender their lawless propensities
intelligently and freely. They must be led to see that the
attitude of society toward them is not that of gratuitous and
hostile menace, but of calm justice and necessary self-defence.
Something wonderful is it to see how completely the law, as
an object of aversion and terror, passes away from the violator
of it so soon as he comes into relations with it of right and
willing obedience.
This same distinction leads us on to the true idea of both
political and religious enlightenment and freedom, and points
out how that idea is to be realized. It instructs us that the
millennium of political freedom is not to be brought in through
the destruction of government; not by communism nor agrarianism; not by the burning of decrees, codes and statutes;
not by the tearing down of senate houses and thrones. Political abuses, oppressions, inequalities are surely to pass away,
but not through the iconoclasm of mobs. "All the overthrows
of all the tyrannies of ancient or modern times were never
able to make corruption free. Let changes (of policy or administration) be as specious as they may, the political suffering
will only deepen until the personal reform come to redeem the
1877.]
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