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The Life Beyond Death2224
the Astral Plane. He finds himself unable to escape from the judgment seat
of conscience, and he leads himself away to his reward or punishment. Such
is the poetic justice of Nature, which far exceeds any conception of mortal
man in his religious speculations.
And, note the absolute equity and justice of it all. Man is judged according
to the highest standards of his own soul, which, of course, represent the
standards of his time and environment. The best in himself—the highest of
which he is capable—judges and passes upon all in him below that standard.
The result of this is that what the highest reason conceives as absolute justice
is meted out by the soul to itself. The leading thinkers of the race almost
unanimously agree that any arbitrary standard of punishment, such as is
expressed by the criminal codes of the race, must necessarily fall far short of
meting out invariable actual justice. For the environment and education of
the criminal may have been such that the commission of the crime is almost
natural to him; while the same crime, committed by another, would be the
result of a direct betrayal of his conscience and a breaking of a moral law of
which he is fully aware and conscious. We would hardly call it criminal for
the fox to steal a chicken, or for the cat slyly to lap milk from the bowl on the
table. There are many human beings whose sense of moral right and wrong
is but little above that of the above named animals. Therefore, even human
law, at least theoretically aims not to punish, but to restrain by example and
precept.
In connection with the thought expressed in the preceding paragraph, we
must remember that absolute justice has no place for punishment as such. As
we have said, theoretically at least, even human law does not seek to punish
the criminal, but merely seeks the following ends, viz: (1) To warn others not
to commit a like crime; (2) to restrain the criminal from committing further
crime, by confining him, or by imposing other deterring penalties; (3) to
reform the criminal by pointing out the advantages of right action and the
disadvantage of wrong action. This being true even of finite human law, what
should we expect of infinite cosmic law, in this particular? Surely, nothing