CIVIL PENALTIES FOR RELIGIOUS OFFENCES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 46, 18 March 1898, Page 4

CIVIL PENALTIES FOR RELIGIOUS OFFENCES.

THE session for the present year of the Historical Research Society was continued at Archbishop's House (says the Tablet) by a paper on the subject of " Civil Penalties for Religious Offences," read by Mgr. J. S. Vaughan. The lecturer dwelt on the great misconceptions, misunderstandings, and prejudices on that and other historical subjects, which arose from judging one age of history by the criterion belonging to another. In their own day they separated civil laws from spiritual laws, consequently civil from spiritual offences. Bub it was not always so. He instanced the Theooratic character of the Hebraic dispensation, where the spiritual and civil rul t was one and the same person, and infringement of the laws in each sphere was punished by the same officials, and in a similar manner. The severity, as well as the identity, of the punishment inflicted for what seemed to them of the present day comparatively trivial oir'ences, was also illustrated. For breaking the Sabbath, bearing false witness, and many offences of similar gravity, the punishment was do ith. The punishment of death, too, was inflicted with circumstances of torture, .such as they now turned from with repugnance. Criminals were hanged, burnt, slain with the sword, crushed with heavy weights, thrown from a height, etc., etc.

The early Christians enacted punishments for spiritual offences. False religions made spiritual offences punishable by the State. The Greek State punished -neglect of worship of the gods. Pythagoras, who was what would be now called an agnostic, was banished because he declared that no one knew whether the gods ttwy worshipped were gods oi not. Socrates was killed by poison because he repudiated the«gods of the State. The religion of ancient Rome was essentially a State religion in which the king was king, judge, and high priest. The principle was fully recognised and acted on from the earliest ages. The Catholic Church, then, did not invent punishment for spiritual offences. They had given up in their own day punishment for such offence-s. Formerly penalties were directed against what was wrong or what was thought to be wrong ; at the present time it was otherwise. Full liberty was claimed in all things which did not interfere with others. Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Mill, were quoted as exponents of that doctrine of government. Where the consequences of an act were confined to a man himself, Mill claiuud that the man was subject to no law, and had a ri^ht absolute over himself. An immoral act was punished in the old law because it was immoral ; the law of the pi\ sjut day took no cognisance of it if it did not violate the liberty of another. The lecturer next dealt with the severity of the penal codes of former times compared with existing times. For example, the luM\iest pen.ility to which man can condemn his fcllow-iuau is death, ami th.it is visited only on high treat-on an-1 muuler. It i-, not Im^ a^o pi nee the code of punl-hment was much more severe. At the close of last century ;J1 oil\ me^ were doomed worthy <>t il» a" h ,ai the beginning of that centuiy more than 100. 11 in.-Lstonc said there -were 100 acts which Parliament ju<'g<d worthy of instant (Kith The penalties were. moreover, inflicted in a Inu barons way. Fur a theft of over 12 pence men were executed in the reign of Liizabeth Comparing that reiirn with the present one., m Elizabeth's re»n ■100 executions took place in one year, iv a population of less than ii v^

millions. That, for the population of the present day, would mean 2,800 death penalties for Elizabeth as against 23 for Victoria. The executions took place, too, under conditions of great depravity and barbarity. It was necessary, therefore, to judge ot' the acts of an age by the btandard of progress and civilisation which had been reached in that age, and by the principles which governed it. Lecky was quoted to show the mild and beneficent influence of the Church in barbarous times in softening the manners and humanising the elements of society. Lecky contrasted the clemency of the Church as a society clothed with the authority of twelve hundred years and the centre of civilization among the nations, defending itself against the deadly attack of Protestantism, with thf» intolerant savagery of mushroom sects, without history and wi hout authority, in tneir vindictive assaults against the Church, not less than in their rivalry of mutual persecution. Instances of th it barbarity of persecution in London and Edinburgh were enumerated and compared with the mildness of the Inquisition. To bum up, in former days men jndged and punished evil because it was evil. To-day they felt themselves incompetent to deal wth evil for its own sake ; in so far as men did not interfere with their neighbours the State did not touch them. The development of society was gradual, and it was impossible to judge the actions of a more barbaroas age by th 9 maxims and practice of later and more enlightened times.