Take another illustration: suppose that twenty years ago a criminal forged your name to a check for ten thousand dollars. It was the work of a moment. A stroke or two of the pen and the work was done. The criminal never confessed the act, nor ever uttered a penitential word. You had him prosecuted, and he was imprisoned for ten years. He has now been at large ten years. Have you forgiven him? Have you invited him to your family circle? Have you restored him to your confidence? You answer, "No!" What then becomes of the argument of proportion? He was imprisoned ten years for a crime that consumed less than ten minutes in its perpetration. Ten years of punishment for ten minutes of crime! But you say the criminal is impenitent; he has never acknowledged his sin, and never asked for forgiveness. Time has no mitigating influence upon guilt. If a criminal continues impenitent respecting any crime, he is as guilty of that crime on the last day of his life as he was in the very hour of its committal, although he may have survived that hour fifty years. The question between the criminal and society is not one of time, but of penitence. Look at the question of proportion from another point. Here is a man who has sustained an unspotted reputation for half a century. He has been regarded as a pattern of benevolence, and his credit is unquestioned. But he is proved guilty of crime. The criminal had no idea that his crime was known, but it is made public. How does society treat that splendid reputation, which was fifty years in building? Does it deduct but one day from the fifty years of reputation, and regard the crime as but a spot on the disk of a brilliant life? Does it not rather raze the very foundations of the structure that was fifty years in building, and forgets half a century of unchallenged life in one day's discovered villainy? All actions are influential. What is done in an hour may affect society through many generations. Punishment is not regenerative. A felon who has undergone a term of imprisonment may leave the prison as great a criminal as when he entered it. The fact of his imprisonment does not make him an honest man. Hell itself, if intermediate instead of final, would not convert men to Christianity. 2. It has been urged that, as virtue is its own reward, and vice its own punishment, the criminal is sufficiently punished while upon earth, and need not, therefore, have hell superadded. If the argument is valid in relation to hell, it is equally valid in relation to heaven. The logic which closes hell annihilates heaven. If vice is its own punishment, why should the thief be imprisoned, or the murderer executed? Why not leave the criminal simply to his own remorse of conscience? The fact is, by the repetition of crime conscience becomes hardened, and the old criminal suffers less compunction for murder than the young offender does for some petty theft.