not argue that he is incapable of becoming better, or that he is devoid of feeling. A judge in central New York, whose head is whitened with the coming frosts of age, and who has long sat on the bench of justice, said to me, "In the whole course of my experience as a judge, I have never yet had a criminal before me for sentence, but whose feelings I could touch, and whose heart I could subdue, by referring to the mother who watched over and sustained him, or by kindly and affectionately describing to him the evil which he had brought upon himself." A community practises the law of kindness when it places men over its prisons, who are qualified for their duty by a thorough acquaintance with human nature, by the most extensive and earnest Christian benevolence, joined with prudent firmness, and by a deep conviction that criminals are morally sick, and are deprived of their liberty only that moral medicine may be applied to them to restore them to the health of virtue. A nation practises the law of kindness when its energies are directed to the advancement of education in reference to each and every one of its members. Especially when its attention is directed to the education of the poor children, who may now be found in every community, growing up in ignorance, theft, and crime of all kinds, to fill jails and prisons, and at last to form a debased rabble, subject to the nod of any demagogue who may use them to destroy the government. The kindness consists in preparing of God and the honour of our king and nation."-Penny Magazine, vol. viii. p. 283. them by knowledge to become good citizens and defenders of the constitution, as well as lovers of religion and virtue. A nation or community practises the law of kindness when it stretches the broad hand of its protection over the poor as well as the rich, and seeks to raise the condition of the lowly and degraded, when it aims to remove poverty and distress, by encouraging industry, by compelling the idle to be active, by removing the causes of crime, and by holding out encouragement to the weak and the feeble. In these, and in many other ways, a nation or a community may practise the law of kindness. And I have no hesitation in saying, that a nation or community practising it will become the abode of truth, virtue, peace, justice, temperance, and love towards God and man. CHAPTER X. KINDNESS AND PERSECUTION. "Hence jarring sectaries may learn Their real interests to discern ; That brother should not war with brother, COWPER. PERHAPS there is no one subject pertaining to the welfare of men in which the practice of kindness is more needed, or is more efficacious, than in the method of advancing or establishing what, in different ages of Christendom, has been named Religion. And it may well be added, that in no one department of life has it been more flagrantly neglected, or its opposite, cruelty, been more thoroughly manifested, in all its horrible features. For no sooner did professed Christians exclude the Pagans from the government of the Roman empire, than they began to persecute each other with all the painful forms in which bigotry can develop itself. And from that time to the present, as sect after sect has obtained the ascendancy over other sects, persecution, in some one of its numerous phases, has been put into requisition, to establish a uniformity of religious faith. Seldom indeed are the instances in which truth has been scattered, and left to win its own triumphs over error in minds untrammelled by the fear of political power. In most cases, the spirit of Mahommed's watch word to his conquered subjects, "the Koran or the sabre," has been adopted by dominant sects of professed followers of Christ, in order to compel other and weaker sects to bow to their will, and receive their creed as the word of God. It is too true, that the records of ecclesiastical history speak in acts of blood, instead of rejoicing in the blessings of a Christian toleration, whose foundation is the divine truth, that "love worketh no ill to his neighbour." Let any person take up the history of the sons and daughters of Israel, from the time when the Emperor Constantine reared a politico-Christian banner, very nearly to our own days, and what is its voice? For their stern and dogmatic adhesion to the faith of their fathers, professed Christians have made them write their history in their own blood, and suffer forms of cruelty, especially in Germany, by the first horde of crusaders under the command of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Pennyless; and half a century after, in the same country, under the instigation of the preaching of the monk Rodolph, who advocated the necessity of "wreaking vengeance on all the enemies of God;" and in the fifteenth century, under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, in Spain', forms of cruelty which make humanity shrink with affright, and which none but hearts hardened with the iron of 1 Milman's History of the Jews. revenge could inflict. The multitudes of heretics, or, in other words, of those who differed in faith from the reigning sect of the times, who perished at the Auto da Fes, on the racks, and in the dungeons of the unholy inquisition; the murder of sixty thousand Protestant Huguenots, the slaughter of whom commenced on the 24th of August, 1572, under the reign of Charles the Ninth, of France, and with circumstances of horror'; the persecution of the Puritans in England; the whipping of Baptists; the hanging of Quakers, and the destruction of reputed witches by the pilgrim fathers of New England; 2 1 Goodrich's Ecclesiastical History, p. 291. 2 Red Jacket, the famous chief of the Seneca Indians, once made a most sarcastic allusion to the witchcraft of New England, which I cannot forbear giving, though it has no reference to the theme of this work. In 1821 a member of his tribe died. The cause of his death was not understood; which, with some other circumstances, led them to believe that he was bewitched. The woman who attended him was denounced as the witch, and, according to the laws of her tribe, was condemned to death; which sentence was executed by a chief named Tom-Jemmy. Tom-Jemmy was tried by the whites for murder, but was acquitted. Red Jacket was one of the witnesses. While on the stand, the Seneca witch doctrine was ridiculed by some of the Americans. Red Jacket replied in the following strain :— "What! do you denounce us as fools and bigots because we still continue to believe that which you yourselves sedulously inculcated two centuries ago? Your divines have thundered this doctrine from the pulpit, your judges have pronounced it from the bench, your courts of justice have sanctioned it with the formalities of the law, and you would now punish our unfortunate brother for adherence to the superstitions of his fathers! Go to Salem! Look at the records of your government, and you will find hundreds executed for the very crime |