When the dram-seller and
drinker were incessantly told not in accents of entreaty and persuasion,
diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring brother, but in the
thundering tones of anathema and denunciation with which the lordly judge
often groups together all the crimes of the felon's life, and thrusts
them in his face just ere he passes sentence of death upon him that they
were the authors of all the vice and misery and crime in the land; that
they were the manufacturers and material of all the thieves and robbers
and murderers that infest the earth; that their houses were the workshops
of the devil; and that their persons should be shunned by all the good
and virtuous, as moral pestilences--I say, when they were told all this,
and in this way, it is not wonderful that they were slow to acknowledge
the truth of such denunciations, and to join the ranks of their
denouncers in a hue and cry against themselves.
To have expected them to do otherwise than they did to have expected them
not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimination with crimination,
and anathema with anathema--was to expect a reversal of human nature,
which is God's decree and can never be reversed.
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