very mother-love only intensifies her loathing, and sharpens her determination to rescue him, at whatever cost of his own suffering or of hers, from what is death to him, and therefore worse than death to her. It is in this sense that we often affirm "God loves the sinner but hates the sin."

This distinction, however, is not always easy to maintain. The wrong-doer may be overtaken in a fault, and then quickly try to repent and return to the place where he was before; or he may hold to it, and continue to identify himself, as it were, with it. There is no such thing as sin in the abstract. If I fall, and having fallen, try to rise, I repudiate the carelessness that made me stumble; that carelessness ceases to exist. But if, having done the wrong, I refuse to turn from it, the wrong is not only past but present; the sin is not only something that I have done, but something that is in me. He who says, "Evil, be thou my good," identifies evil, not only with his good, but with himself. Thus, to hate the sin becomes necessarily to hate the sinner. Your friend, temporarily in need of money, betrays a secret you have committed to him. You despise the fault, while you long to receive the culprit back into the old friendship. But if your friend proceeds to brazen it out, and refuses to utter a word of penitence or of regret, your dislike of the treachery becomes inevitably dislike of the traitor.1 A son, as in our illustration in the last chapter, leaves his father's home, disobeys his father's bidding, and comes near to breaking his father's heart. How is he regarded? With love? Yes, but with a stern pity also, which will

1 Compare the way in which Percy Dacier's regard for Diana Warwick changed to contempt on his discovery that she had sold to a newspaper the state secret with which he had entrusted her. See George Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways."

be felt by him (if he can feel at all), and by his father also, as anger. What is it that has broken the filial bond and ruined the father's hopes? The lad's sin. But if the lad holds to that sin, persists in it, refuses to be separated from it, acknowledges it defiantly as his own act and deed, it is he who is responsible, and it is on him—contradictory as this may seem-that his father's anger must fall.

This is not to assert that there need be any irritation in the father's mind; irritation is swallowed up in the far nobler emotion of righteous indignation. Such indignation would be strong within him even against a stranger who erred so; it is doubly strong when the object is his own son. In the case of any wrong, and especially in the case of such a wrong, where the son has cut himself off from sonship-has robbed his father of a son-we must take sides against the wrongdoer. For there is something that the father cares for more than for the lad; namely, the relation that binds the lad to him; nor will he sacrifice the value of that permanent relation for the sake of a transient peace. "My country, right or wrong," is no motto for the true patriot.

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more";

this is the true philosophy of the strong man's love, which recognises that the closest personal attachment is worth little, unless ennobled by the principles of honour, truth, and loyalty underlying it. If these are gone, the old love can only clothe itself in anger until they are restored.

V. Is it, then, enough that love should merely clothe itself in anger? Love cannot be passive only; it must Anger, too, must be active as well as

also be active.

passive; negative, and also positive. The father, suffering from the estrangement which his son has caused, cannot force from himself the usual tokens of affection; the impulse to accord them will still be there, no doubt; but it takes two to love, as it takes two to quarrel. You cannot caress when the caress will be repulsed; the words of affection that will not be listened to cannot even be uttered; signs of tenderness cannot be cast before those who will trample them under foot. This negative anger, the withholding of what once was a joy both to give and to receive, may at times be unnoticed and unfelt by its object; at other times it may cause the keenest and most salutary grief. But there is a positive anger which the culprit must be made to feel. No advance in the science of education can obscure the wisdom of the old proverb, "Spare the rod and spoil the child."

Punishment is undoubtedly one of the most difficult and expensive modes of education. But it cannot and ought not to be dispensed with, for two reasons. In the first place, sin wherever it is found, must be attacked; the vigorous moral indignation against sin of which Butler spoke, is a necessity for every healthy mind. Where the sinner has identified himself with his sin, he must be made to see what he has done, and to pay the price. That he should do so, is inevitable sooner or later. But in addition to the internal demoralisation and disintegration consequent on sin, there must also be the outward infliction of penalty on the sin which encroaches on my neighbour's rights or destroys the true relations between man and man ; no man sinneth to himself." In the second place, punishment will often, as we say, bring a man to his senses; and he who inflicts the punishment will have to repre

sent to the culprit his own best self. Crime and penalty cannot be balanced quantitatively against one another; but the amount of pain to be inflicted will often be determined by the gravity of the warning necessary to deter others from committing the same crime, and the amount of suffering necessary to right the warped vision of the criminal. Thus the primitive conviction that the sinner deserves punishment is of abiding worth; but it is only the good man, seeing sin in its right light, who can use the words of the truism despised of children," it hurts me more than it hurts you," and who feels his very love for the sinner goading him to inflict the punishment.

This is another paradox among the many created by this strange anomaly of punishment born of affection. Cowper once said, "I could never understand why, if my mother loved me more than other boys, she punished me when she did not punish them."1 He did not understand, and few children could understand, that his mother's anger was not against him simply, but against him as in a false position, in a false relation to her for which his disobedience to her was responsible. We say of a person who is acting strangely that he is not himself; and common expressions often have in them more metaphysics than we think. The lunatic or the idiot, we all feel, is certainly "not himself"; he has become to us a different person; so different, in fact, that he will turn against those round whom his affections used to cluster in happier days; and we ourselves must adopt a quite new attitude to him. It

1 Compare for a Greek parallel to this the charming description of the conversation of Socrates with the boy Lysis, who explains that he would be punished if he attempted to do what his parents' servants are paid for doing.-Plato, "Lysis," 208-9.

would be right neither to him nor to other people to behave to him as if he were his normal self. So with sin. We are accustomed to look upon sin as what is natural; but is this so? Is not sin as much a contravention of what is natural and healthy as lunacy itself? To use our old phrase, it destroys the right relations between man and man, as completely as does the lunatic's mental aberration. If my friend's mind gives way, I can respect him for what he was, and for what I feel that he still is in reality; I cannot respect the imbecile; I can only pity him and try by patience or firmness, or both, to heal him. And if my friend gives way in a sadder fashion, if he yields to drink or falls into immorality or flings away his old veracity, I can love him for what he was to me, for what I believe he will be again, for what I would fain think he really is, even at present; so, too, I can determine, like David in Browning's well-known poem,

"To interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now,—and bid him awake"; but I cannot love the drunkard or the liar; I must loathe the drunkenness, and I must loathe the man who accepts such a degrading yoke. Sin is a kind of lunacy; but it is a guilty lunacy. I must bring the man back to his old proper self; I must "whip the offending Adam out of him," as some savage tribes are said to scourge malignant influences even out of those who represent their gods.1 Where the offence is a moral one, the scourging must be more than merely therapeutic; I cannot but act in sorrow; and must also act in anger.

This distinction, however unfamiliar to most minds, 1 Frazer, "The Golden Bough," iii. pp. 127, 128.