But the State in all its actions is of necessity mechanical, and cannot take account of the individual, and all that makes him what he is. The State officer cannot know the prisoner in such a way as really to determine the treatment allotted to him in the light of what is best for his spiritual welfare; and therefore he has to fall back upon rough and ready rules which will never be perhaps very far from the right treatment, though they may fail to allot the ideal treatment in any single case. And here, in parenthesis, let me just mention that this is the chief reason why metaphors and comparisons drawn from the law-courts are so sadly misleading when used to illustrate the relation between the human soul and God; our only fear of the judge is concerned with what he will do to us; but what we fear with our father, on earth or in Heaven, is not so much what he will do to us, as the pain we have caused—"There is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt Thou be feared." Our Lord’s method is the only one that aims straight at the evil will; it is the only method which has in it any real hope of converting the individual. It may fail time and again; but it is the only one that has a chance of real and absolute success. Let us look for a moment at the instances which He chooses to illustrate the principle, and we shall see at once that they are carefully chosen. All the acts chosen are such as are particularly vexatious to the ordinary natural and selfish man—being struck in the face; having a vexatious suit brought against one; being pestered by a beggar; being compelled to do something for the public service when we are busy. Those are just the things which the natural man resents and which the real Christian will not mind at all. For, after all, there is no real injury in being struck in the face, or having one’s coat taken away. What one minds is the insult to one’s precious dignity; and the Christian who, by definition, has forgotten all about himself will not mind such injuries at all. Therefore if the acts commanded are spontaneously done and not done with a laborious conscientiousness—that is to say if they are done in the spirit of Christianity, and not in the spirit of Pharisaism—they will express a complete conversion in the will of him who does them; they will express absolute conquest of self, and a concern solely for the welfare of him with whom we are dealing; and there is no heart yet made that can resist the appeal of love which is constant in spite of every betrayal, the appeal of trust which is renewed in spite of endless disappointments.