Or, and this is the only alternative, they must have said, ‘This is God’s law; and He executes it here. But though it is God’s business, and in God’s hands, still, notwithstanding, it is executed in a very incomplete and insufficient way. Many escape punishment; and many do not get rewarded at all. And those who are rewarded and punished here, are rewarded and punished in very inadequate measures. In every instance there may be, indeed there is, more or less of a miscarriage of justice. But there will be future rewards and punishments, which with set all this right.’ Suppose this had been what had been said; and then see what would have been the consequences. It would have suggested to every man the thought, even the hope, that he might escape in part, perhaps altogether, in this life, the punishment of any crime he was contemplating. But what was most vitally needed was, that is should be seen, and felt, by the people, that punishment would be quite unerring, and as severe as unerring. This way of introducing the doctrine would have been thoroughly illogical; and not more illogical than, morally and politically, bad in its effects. It would have been illogical, because it would have been in direct contradiction to the idea, that it was God who was seeing to the execution of His own law: a point that was as clear to the people as that intelligence governs the universe is to us; and which was the very thought that gave authority and force to the law. And it would have been morally, and politically, bad in its effects, because the vicious, and the ill-disposed, and the would-be criminals of all kinds, are not withheld from doing evil so much by the fear of punishment in the world to come as by fear of punishment here in this world. Nothing encourages them so much in their evil courses as the expectation of present impunity. And this was peculiarly applicable to the people for whom Moses legislated. They were, throughout the whole of the earlier part of their history, ever ready to forget and abandon God; and their temper required, in the highest degree, immediate punishments. Neither, therefore, could the doctrine have been introduced by Moses in this fashion.