and it will grow up a stunted and poor tree. But in the case of the
human being, there is more than this difference in degree. There may be
a difference in kind. The human being may grow up to be, as it were,
a fair and healthful fruit-tree, or to be a poisonous one. There is
something positively awful about the potentialities that are in
human nature. The Archbishop of Canterbury might have grown up under
influences which would have made him a bloodthirsty pirate or a sneaking
pickpocket. The pirate or the pickpocket, taken at the right time, and
trained in the right way, might have been made a pious, exemplary man.
You remember that good divine, two hundred years since, who, standing in
the market-place of a certain town, and seeing a poor wretch led by him
to the gallows, said, "There goes myself, but for the grace of God." Of
course, it is needful that human laws should hold all men as equally
responsible. The punishment of such an offence is such an infliction, no
matter who committed the offence. At least the mitigating circumstances
which human laws can take into account must be all of a very plain and
intelligible character. It would not do to recognize anything like a
graduated scale of responsibility. A very bad training in youth would be
in a certain limited sense regarded as lessening the guilt of any wrong
thing done; and you may remember, accordingly, how that magnanimous
monarch, Charles II., urged to the Scotch lords, in extenuation of the
wrong things he had done, that his father had given him a very bad
education. But though human laws and judges may vainly and clumsily
endeavor to fix each wrongdoer's place in the scale of responsibility,
and though they must, in a rough way, do what is rough justice in five
cases out of six, still we may well believe that in the view of the
Supreme Judge the responsibilities of men are most delicately graduated
to their opportunities. There is One who will appreciate with entire
accuracy the amount of guilt that is in each wrong deed of each
wrong-doer, and mercifully allow for such as never had a chance of being