-Lunacy and Letters (1958)
Sunday, March 14, 2021
What is specially shameful and pitiless in modern punishment is not
the severity of the punishment; it is the continuity of the punishment.
The modern philosophers say that they do not like the idea of
everlasting punishment in the other world. Let them rest content.
They have created everlasting punishment in this world.
What is frightful about modern punishment is exactly that it
is as logical as Calvinism. Its horror is that it is rational,
that it remembers, that it treats the man who has broken trust as for
ever untrustworthy. There may be something in this which pleases
those who have Calvinistic, Materialistic, or Theosophical minds,
minds that enjoy the recurrence of an unforgiving, that is, a dead, law.
But you and I only have the tradition of Christian charity,
and we should say, Beat the man about with a great stick and then
let him go free for ever.
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