Could one, for
example, imagine that Providence, all-wise and all-merciful, as
every creed proclaims, could punish the unfortunate wretch who
hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a criminal
head? A doctor has but to glance at the cranium to predicate the
crime. In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the
Ripper, is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross
national sins to which allusion has been made seem to point to
collective national insanity. Surely, then, there is hope that
no very terrible inferno is needed to further punish those who
have been so afflicted upon earth. Some of our dead have
remarked that nothing has surprised them so much as to find who
have been chosen for honour, and certainly, without in any way
condoning sin, one could well imagine that the man whose organic
makeup predisposed him with irresistible force in that direction
should, in justice, receive condolence and sympathy. Possibly
such a sinner, if he had not sinned so deeply as he might have
done, stands higher than the man who was born good, and remained
so, but was no better at the end of his life. The one has made
some progress and the other has not. But the commonest failing,
the one which fills the spiritual hospitals of the other world,
and is a temporary bar to the normal happiness of the after-life,
is the sin of Tomlinson in Kipling's poem, the commonest of all
sins in respectable British circles, the sin of conventionality,
of want of conscious effort and development, of a sluggish
spirituality, fatted over by a complacent mind and by the
comforts of life.
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