I'M 



frequently witnessed executions, the sight of which had 

 suggested to them the idea of their crimes. Executions had 

 a brutalizing effect on the public mind, and excited a ran- 

 corous and vengeful feeling towards the law in the whole 

 body of criminals. The law ought not to imitate the crime 

 it professed to condemn. Why was the executioner an 

 object of such deep and general abhorrence, if the penalty 

 of death was beneficial ? The punishment of death made 

 no reparation for the crime — it only increased the evil 

 already inflicted. If, then, the interests of society were not 

 promoted — if they were even injured — by the punishment 

 of death, we were bound to consider it as it affected the 

 criminal himself. The question of his future doom made 

 this an awful consideration Much was sometimes made, 

 indeed, of his alleged penitence and conversion, which, if 

 granted, only reduced us to the dilemma of putting a man 

 to death who was either not fit to die, when it was fearful to 

 contemplate, or who teas fit to die, and therefore fit to live, 

 when it was needless and cruel. 



The irrevocableness of capital punishment was another 

 strong objection, taken in connexion with the uncertainty 

 of human judgment. Many persons had been executed, 

 afterwards proved to be innocent, and this had, no doubt, 

 contributed to the uncertainty accompanying capital punish- 

 ment, stronger evidence being required than the nature of 

 the case often admitted. 



The alleged arguments from the Old Testament, in 

 favour of capital punishment, were examined and answered, 

 it being shown that the injunctions given to Noah and 

 Moses were adapted to a totally different state of society 

 from our own, — that, if they proved any thing, they proved 

 too mucb, commanding the infliction of death for numerous 

 offences now slightly punished, or even not deemed unlawful, 

 and, finally, that the spirit of Christianity had set aside the 

 spirit of the former covenant. 



