Let us look at it for just a minute. People do not seem able as yet to
understand that a man is really "punished," in the popular sense of
that word, unless they can see him publicly whipped. It does not seem
to them to mean anything because a man deteriorates, because the
highest and finest qualities in him atrophy and threaten to die out. I
used an illustration in my sermon two weeks ago to which I shall have
to recur again, to see if I can make it mean more than it did then. It
is the story of Ulysses who fell into the hands of the famous
sorceress, and whose companions were turned into swine. Now would you
be willing to be turned into a pig, merely because, being a pig, you
would not know anything about it, and would not suffer? Would you be
willing to be reduced to the life of an oyster, merely because, being
an oyster, you would be haunted by no restless ideals, and, so far as
you had any sense at all, would probably be very comfortable indeed? Is
there no "punishment" in this deprivation of the highest and finest
things that we can conceive of?
It seems to me that a person who has deteriorated, who has become
selfish, who has become mean, who has lost all taste for high and fine
and sweet things, and is unconscious of them, is having meted out to
him the worst conceivable retribution. If a man is mean and knows it,
if a man is selfish and is conscious of it, if a man is unjust and is
stung by the reflection, there is a little hope for him, there is life
there, there is moral vitality, there is a chance for him to
recuperate, to climb up into something higher and finer; but, if he has
not only become degraded and mean, but has become contented in that
condition, it seems to me that he is worse off than almost anybody else
of whom we can dream.
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