A Horrible Crime; a Fearful Sentence by J. N. Q.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 1, 1910

A Horrible Crime; a Fearful Sentence

By J. N. Q.

JUDGE MARCUS KAVANAGH, of Chicago, in pronouncing sentence upon a prisoner guilty of forcing his wife to become a “white slave,” shooting her when she refused to give him money, and murdering a woman who sought to defend her from his brutal assault, vividly portrayed the difference between capital punishment and solitary imprisonment for life. He said, as reported in the Washington Star of October 12:—

You committed a terrible crime. Your punishment is to be more terrible still. The instinctive, unreasoning horror of mankind regards death as a severe punishment. This idea is not correct. You are now to receive a sterner punishment. Your victim died but once. You will die a hundred times; you will suffer more the day you put on your prison clothes than she did in her death. After that there will be only the hopeless, painful years, from day to day, from month to month, stretching out forever in agony. In four or five years the eternal solitude and silence will begin to crush in upon you like an iron weight. You hear that street-car bell ringing in the street as it passes now. You will remember it in after-years as the most exquisite music. It will mean hurrying crowds that go where they like and do as they please; it will mean the greatest of all pleasures—freedom. You can only dream of it by day and by night, and your dream will be torture unbearable.

One shudders in contemplating such a terrible experience, and yet there comes relief to know that at last death will terminate its horror. According to popular theology, which places billions of human beings in flames, not for a short lifetime, but for an eternity, and the suffering to increase as the ages slowly pass by, the sentence of this judge but faintly describes the terrors of the finally impenitent. What a calumny on the character of the Almighty! How entirely contrary to the teaching of the Word of God! The wages of sin will be death, not eternal misery in hell; and eventually God will be all and in all, and every creature in heaven and earth and in all parts of God’s universe will ascribe praise to him that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb, forever and ever. J. N. Q.