The Latest Infidelity.pdf 487KB May 19 2009 - R.L. Dabney Archive

618 THE LATEST INFIDELITY.
drunkard's gastritis? But those are avowedly penal. Once
more, Colonel Ingersoll on his theory would have to explain the
imprisonment which he visits on a felon, as precisely parallel
to the detention in a quarantine ship of a virtuDus citizen who
has just had the bad luck to sail recently from a yellow-fever
port. Are the two inflictions precisely the same expediences
for the public good, equally unfounded on an imputation of
guilt to the sufferers? That is the explanation to which his
philosophy would lead him; but he dare not accept it. He
knows that the virtuous traveler is detained in spite of his in-
nocence; but the felon is detained because of his guilt. Be
who says that the natural evils incurred by misconduct are not
penalties, but mere consequences, ought also tD say that evils
which society, itself a natural institution, inflicts on criminals
are also mere consequences, and not just penalties. But against
this every conscience revolts.
Our second point of objection is: that Colonel Ingersoll's
doctrine about natural -evils, if true, would be unspeakably
harsher and more repulsive than the Christian doctrine, which
he thinks too harsh to be endured. For, first, it places us er-
ring mortals not under the dominion of a righteous personal
will, which is also wise, benevolent, and merciful, but under the
rule of invariable natural laws. Under these, the evils which
men experience, saith he, are not penalties, but mere conse-
quences. Now a code which has no penalties of course has no
pardons. There is no room in it for the conception of forgive-
ness. It tells a suffering transgressor that, when once his mis-
take is made, his suffering must be as inevitable as the attrac-
tion of gravitation or the rotation of the earth. Can mere na-
tural law hear a prayer? Does it understand repentance? Can
it feel pity? Ask the ocean storm or the devouring Are these
questions. Here truly we have humanity with a vengeance!
The skeptic is too humane to endure the conception of penal
chastisement directed *by a personal God, who is both just and
merciful; and to help matters, he proposes to consign his fellow-
creatures to the iron and remorseless dominion of natural law,
which is equally ignorant of repentance, mercy, and forgive-
ness. But, he says, let the erring man reform his mistake, and
thereby he will emerge from the painful consequences. Is this
true? Does he not know that the constant tendency of natural