And this want of faith in a living God lies at the bottom of another
objection. We are to keep murderers alive in order to convert and
instruct and amend them. The answer is, We shall be most happy to amend
anybody of any fault, however great: but the experience of ages is that
murderers are past mending; that the fact of a man's murdering another is
a plain proof that he has no moral sense, and has become simply a brute
animal Our duty is to punish not to amend, and to say to the murderer,
"If you can be amended; God will amend you, and so have mercy on your
soul. God must amend you, if you are to be amended. If God cannot amend
you, we cannot. If God will not amend you, certainly we cannot force Him
to do so, if we kept you alive for a thousand years." That would seem
reasonable, as well as reverent and faithful to God. But men now-a-days
fancy that they love their fellow creatures far better than God loves
them, and can deal far more wisely and lovingly with them than God is
willing to deal. Of these objections I take little heed. I look on them
as merely loose cant, which does not quite understand the meaning of its
own words, and I trust to sound, hard, English common sense to put them
aside.

But there is another objection to capital punishment, which we must deal
with much more respectfully and tenderly; for it is made by certain good
people, people whom we must honour, though we differ from them, for no
set of people have done more (according to their numbers) for education,
for active charity, and for benevolence, and for peace and good will
among the nations of the earth. And they say, you must not take the life
of a murderer, just because he is made in God's image. Well, I should
have thought that God Himself was the best judge of that. That, if God
truly said that man was made in His image, and said, moreover, as it were
at the same moment, that, therefore, whoso sheds man's blood, by man
shall his blood be shed--our duty was to trust God, to obey God, and to