PENALTY A NECESSITY OF LAW.
By James B. Walker
LAW is a necessity of things, and penalty is a necessity of law. This second affirmation, although equally true, may not be assented to so readily as the preceding one. Sometimes there is not a clear apprehension of the difference between the necessity of penalty as a final issue, and the necessity of penalty immediately executed upon the transgressor. It is not affirmed that penalty is always immediate upon the transgression of law, nor that, where transgression has occurred, the penalty may not be counteracted. What we do say is that every law has its penalty. Natural penalty, or rather the penalty natural to law, is progressive derangement tending to ultimate destruction. If disorder be not immediately destructive, then, during the deranged action which follows departure from law, the subject by interposition, as we shall see, may be recovered to obedience; but if not recovered, the destruction of the subject, whatever it may be, is necessary, and therefore certain. We wish to reiterate and illustrate this form of expression until the two cognate truths become lucid and settled convictions. We can perceive enough of the nature and relations of things to know that penalty lies not wholly, nor perhaps mostly, against the subject that transgresses the law. The necessity of penalty is connected with the general good. God has created things, as we have noticed, in relationship to each other, and the restoration or destruction of a transgressing subject is necessary to the harmony and safety of the whole. In the realms both of matter and mind there are facts that elucidate this subject: the physical will illustrate the moral. If a planet should "shoot madly from its sphere," its destruction would be necessary, not so much on its own account (if we may so speak), as on account of its deranging influence upon other bodies. When it lost its place and balance among the spheres, it passed into a condition of disorder which would necessarily terminate in its destruction. This, however, would not be the greatest evil. In its disorder it would necessarily encroach upon the orbits of other bodies, derange the whole system to which it belonged, and, if not destroyed, it would involve the whole in eventual ruin. When it left its prescribed place, then, in view of the safety of other parts of the system, its destruction would become necessary. The very laws which preserved it in its place would cause its destruction out of its place; and in order to save it, God would have to destroy all the physical laws of the system (and then it would not be saved), or adopt some expedient to bring it back and balance the injury which its aberration had occasioned to the members of the solar family. Destruction is a necessity when any member of a system persistently violates the laws of the system. So an animal which violates its instincts departs not only from the laws of adaptation which secure its own happiness, but, as God has filled all departments of nature with body or life appropriate to the several conditions, when an animal leaves the sphere which the787law of its instincts prescribes, it necessarily impinges upon the province of other things, and the good of the whole requires its destruction, and the nature of things secures the infliction of the penalty. We say, the good of the whole requires its destruction. If the ants were to leave the earth, forget their instincts, and live upon the pollen and vital germs of the flowers, the bees would die, and fruit would cease to exist throughout the world. The ants, then, must either be destroyed, or bees and fruits, and everything which lives upon fruits, must suffer. To the disobedient the laws of the universe are inexorable. The law permits no transgression, and provides for no pardon. In so far as law would allow of transgression, it would annul itself and produce evil. A single transgression places the trespassers in the "road to ruin;" and pardon in itself cannot, from the nature of the case, prevent or remit the penalty. Happiness and life being the result of obedience, as we have seen, pardon without a return of the transgressor to the sphere of obedience would be a form without effect. Obedience is the condition of safety and life; therefore, pardon without restoration of the transgressor to obedience is absurd and impossible in a system governed by law. When the first transgression has occurred, there is no strength or influence in the aberrating subject to restore itself. If a planet were to depart from its orbit, the first departure would give it a tendency to depart forever. As a weight upon an inclined plane, the first movement creates a momentum, which will increase until the movement is stopped by an opposing force. If one cog becomes broken in a single wheel, every revolution jars the whole machinery, and widens the fracture, until the injury is repaired or until it becomes irreparable. One departure from rectitude, under all laws, makes another more easy, and every departure increases the difficulty of a restoration to order. The very laws, as we have noticed, which hold a subject to happy obedience, operate for destruction where there has been transgression. The earth is now balanced in our system, and moves in obedience to centrifugal and centripetal forces; but if it were to move from its orbit the balance would be broken, and the disproportionate or illegal action of the two forces would work its destruction. This would be certain unless a sympathy latent in the whole system, or a power above the system, were to accomplish its restoration. If pain be considered penalty, which it may be in one sense, yet pain is not all the penalty of transgressing either organic or moral law. It is part of the penalty only, as progress is part of the result—as derangement is linked with disaster. Pain indicates that there is disease or derangement in the system. If the disorder be removed by compensation from other parts of the system, or by appliances from without, the pain ceases with the removal of the derangement by which it was occasioned. The pain was neither the disease nor the cure. A cancer is a different thing from the pain which it produces. Often the pain abates although there be no remedy for the evil. Let us, then, not mistake pain of body or pain of conscience for the derangement itself, which causes the pain, or for the final penalties of organic or moral law. Pain often abates in the body as the strength of the constitution diminishes to death. Pain may subserve a benevolent design; it is admonitory of existing disorder, or of penalty in progress. But the fact is beyond dispute that death ensues as the ultimate penalty, whether with or without pain, unless the disorder be removed. —Rev. James B. Walker.