But this vengeful exercise of parental authority is only a secondary symptom of belief in a vengeful order of Creation--of a God whose method it was to vindicate the moral law, not by bringing home to ill-doers through natural consequences the defects of certain courses of conduct, but by expressing His moral indignation in exemplary punishments of an arbitrary kind--generally of a miraculous character. When man first conceived of God, he conceived of Him as a sort of Dr. Busby--one in whose mind the Rod was the beginning and end of wisdom; and the Rod of Heaven operated by intervention, over and above the operations of Nature--the law of cause and effect. Natural consequences did not sufficiently vindicate divine justice. A belief in miraculous and vengeful intervention and a belief in “exemplary” legal punishment go together; and will, I believe, die together. A great deal of Old Testament teaching is merely an elaborate extension of _Punch’s_ picture of the British workman holding a brick’s end over an unfortunate batrachian, and saying, “I’ll l’arn ye to be a toad!” And all he succeeds in doing is producing a dead toad instead of a live one; the species itself remaining entirely unaltered. That is a parable of the doings of our theologians, since theology was invented for the Fall of Man. And if humans came to the conclusion that that was the mind of God, it is no wonder that they imitated Him, and do so to this day. We must believe in punishment as the proper reward of crime--we must even believe in unreformative punishment as the proper reward of crime, if we believe in a Hell to which lost souls are relegated against their will, and there kept with no hope whatever of cure or betterment from the process. And that is what the whole of Christendom believed about Hell when Christians really did believe in it. Unreformative punishment upon earth was a necessary consequence of that belief; and, therefore, belief in punishment for the sake of punishment became universal. And over against it--quite unregarded--stood the new gospel of humanity--“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” And then the reason, the key to it all:--“That ye may be children of your Father which is in Heaven, for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.” The Sermon on the Mount, which threw over the doctrine of punishment on earth, threw over with equal emphasis the doctrine of punishment in Heaven--of any arbitrary or miraculous intervention for the betterment (to moral ends) of the law of natural consequences.