CHRIST AND THE SENSE OF JUSTICE.
THE place of what we call justice in the Christian system of ethics- is not very easy to determine. Our Lord made continual appeal to the natural sense of justice. At the same time, He told parables, propounded problems, and pointed to facts deliberately calculated to shake the faith of His hearers in the infallibility of their instinctive feeling on the subject. Many of His stories end with a rough sketch of poetic retribution. We hear of a master who returns unex- pectedly to punish his oppressive substitute ; of a landlord who avenges the injuries done to his agents; of the vicarious gratitude of the Son of Man for kindnesses long forgotten by the doer; of the certainty of an ultimate reckoning to be taken even of those cruelties which arose less from malevolence than neglect. The hearers are not only permitted but invited to take pleasure in contemplating the sure operation of the mills of God. Nevertheless, there are certain allegories and certain plain sayings of Christ which, if they are not in direct contradiction to the ordinary sense of justice, at least insist that it should be to a great extent revised. Take the story of the labourers who agreed to work all day for a given sum, and then complained because certain other men who were put on to work much later received the same wage. At first sight the arrangement seems exceedingly unfair. The instinct of the reader suggests a fellow-feeling for the grumblers. Surely those who bear the burden and heat of the day should gain more than those who do an easy piece of work in the cool of the evening. Our Lord, however, had not the smallest sympathy with the malcontents. They should, He implies, have minded their own business, and abided by their bargain. "Is thine eye evil, because I am good ? " are the words put into the mouth of the employer, and the employer, we are taught, was entirely within his right in so replying to his men. Again, the mental position of the elder son in the parable appeals very much to the reader's instinctive sense of justice. But Christ, though He is far from condemn- ing the elder son (" Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine," cannot be turned by the most pharisaical of minds into a harsh speech), yet makes him stand before His hearers as a type of a good man in the wrong, occupying for the moment, and by reason of his advocacy of superficial equity, a very undignified moral position. To turn from stories to statements. "There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth," is a saying which could give nothing but delight to any well-meaning person. But our Lord did not stop there. He said also : "more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance." To the moral plodder the sentence does give something of a cold shock. What is the use. of so much effort if those who do not make it succeed as well, • it the secret of making the best of both worlds lies with the sinner all the time ? While we are thinking of hard sayings on the subject of justice we must not forget
the question which Christ put to Simon :—" There was a certain creditor which had two debtors : the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty. And when they bad nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most?" Once more the suggestion is hard for the moral plodder, and again our Lord does not stop short at suggestion. " Her sins, which are many, are forgiven," He says ; 'for she loved much : but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little."
What are we to gather from all this rather con- flicting evidence that our Lord thought of justice ? It seems to us that He considered a sense of justice to be the great moral stand-by of the ordinary man. He appealed to it as a goad and an enticement to do right and to avoid wrong. At the same time, He evidently thought that, cardinal virtue though it is, it is none the less exceedingly liable to parasitic growths of a non-moral, and even an immoral,
character. Cruelty, revenge, envy, and that criminal refusal to think a matter out which we call prejudice all grow up in the human mind in such close connection with the sense of justice that it is often almost impossible to divide the one from the other. The workmen in the parable no doubt thought that they were actuated by a spirit of justice, but as a matter of fact they were simply moved by the spirit of envy. They did not ask whether the sum received was a sufficient remuneration for a day's labour, nor whether they could live on it. They had no reasonable ground whatever for thinking themselves underpaid, except the feet that some one else was receiving a wage at a higher rate. Super- ficially the arrangement did not look fair, and they judged after appearances instead of judging righteous judgment. They used a moral rule-of-thumb, measured one man's fortune against another's, and refused to think. The elder brother, in the same way, was very unreasonable. He lost nothing by the feast which was made for the returned prodigal. He might have enjoyed it even, if be had not allowed jealousy to prey upon his sense of justice till they were so much entangled that he could not divide the one from the other. When one thinks of the "sayings" we have quoted, it is necessary, we think; to remember that our Lord was a realist, and a realist is seldom a theorist. We cannot look on life exactly as it is, and not give some very great pain to very good people who have made for themselves a theory which explains life. No doubt the men who at the bottom of their hearts believed that Jehovah rewarded and punished in this life according to character were very much shocked to hear our Lord say that those on whom the Tower of Siloam fell were no worse than other people. They could not bear to think it was true, because it overthrew their pet theory and left them mystified. There are many mysteries to which our Loyd alluded, but which He did not explain. What He said was always true, but on many subjects He left men in the dark ; and He never took any pains to spare the moral prejudices of His hearers. It is true that good people are more delighted when they see a real conversion—some one, that is, who has been saved from the error of his ways—than when they see ninety-nine good persons that need no repentance. It is strange, it is sometimes rather disheartening, that it should be so; but so it is. Again, it is a fact that we do, for all that cynics may say, love those best to whom we owe most. We continually hear some one say : "I should be an ungrateful brute indeed if I did not like So-and-so," and the person in question is no doubt ready to forgive the grateful person a good deal for the sake of his gratitude. It is a fact, and a fact which it must be sometimes morally useful to emphasise.
There can be no doubt, we think, that our Lord very much distrusted the retributive instinct, and much of His teaching was designed to set just men on their guard against it. A keen personal desire to "pay out" is not an integral part of a sense of justice as Christ conceived it. If we allow it to make part of righteous judgment, we come straight back to the old perfectly natural and entirely pagan idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. While our Lord never said anything against the public administration of justice—He upheld the law in unequivocal terms, and paid without resistance a tax of whose imposition he disapproved— Ho allowed no one to take the law into his own bands, having, regard, we suppose, to the fact that an injured person can hardly take an unprejudiced view of what has occurred. If ever there was an excusable instance of such an action, it was when Peter struck the high priest's servant and cut off his ' ear. For all these centuries all readers have liked Peter the better for the act ; but our Lord, though we have no reason to suppose bat that He may have agreed with us in sentiment, frustrated Peter's intention to inflict punishment, telling hint not to have recourse to a violence which could only breed violence again. Occasionally, also, He recommended that faults should be entirely overlooked rather than that the man about to put justice in motion should thereby make himself a hypocrite in his own eyes. He impressed this so intensely upon the minds of the censorious crowd of men longing to put the barbarous law of Moses in force, and stone the woman taken in adultery, that not one of them had the effrontery left to condemn her. Yet without doubt she was guilty, or the words, "Go, and sin no more," would have been meaning- less. An exactly similar case is put before us when the servant is condemned who, having been forgiven by his lord, goes straight from his presence and takes his fellow. servantby the throat, saying: "Pay me that thou owest." The conclusion of the matter seems to be this,—that the natural sense of justice must be freed of revenge, of cruelty, and of self-interested and sentimental theorising before it can be safely relied upon ; and if in the process a few guilty persons escape, society is better served by the • self-discipline of the judging crowd than it could have been by looking on at the preventive warning of the most severe punishment.
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