The crime; but neither Jehovah nor his devoted servant, we had almost said his vicegerent, attempted any thing more. law, if a law, was plainly not in force in its own day. After this period, no mention of "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed," appears in the course of Scripture, while the violation of the principle of blood for blood is of frequent occurrence. Neither does human life appear to have been especially secure among the Jews, nor the law of retaliation to have been universally established. David slew the Amalekite directly and Úriah indirectly, Absalom murdered Amnon, Abimelech murdered seventy brethren, Doeg butchered eighty-five priests; and though most of these murders were deliberate, committed in cold blood, their authors lived on, and some of them at least enjoyed the fruit of their crimes. So much for the commentary of Scripture upon Scripture. In a period of which but few incidents remain on record, a period when by a later covenant than that given to Noah the penalty of death was attached to murder, every form of wanton, cold-blooded human butchery takes place, and murderers escape that penalty beneath the immediate jurisdiction of Jehovah. But, passing from this unintentional and decisive testimony of Jewish kings and prophets, as to the observance of the injunction, let us examine the passage itself, which Dr. Cheever pronounces "the citadel of our argument, commanding and sweeping the whole subject." It is not a little unfortunate for the advocates of capital punishment, that its chief defence has to be sought in a dispensation not our own, not even directly preparatory to our own, but reaching back into the dim starlight of the very rudest civilization, among commands (if commands they are) of a local and temporary kind, as part and parcel of a law condemning the use of the blood of animals as food, and dooming the brute which had even accidentally taken the life of man to be slain. If revelation was intended to be progressive, if the different dispensations afford unequivocal signs of advance one upon another, if human life has been every day these four thousand years rising in sanctity, it will be hard to arrest the humanity of the nineteenth century of Christianity by a single clause in the covenant given to Noah. One line from the Sermon on the Mount, "I say unto you, resist not," that is, repay not, "evil," will be felt to be of more worth than all this obsolete dispensation. 1847.] Genesis ix. 6. 359 But the whole force of the passage rests upon the use of the word "shall." The advocates of the death-penalty insist upon substituting "must," as if the true and only reading was, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man must his blood be shed." Letting alone various interpretations made by scholars of all denominations, long before this discussion commenced, which relieve it entirely of its supposed mandatory character, we have abundant Scriptural authority for adhering to the simplest sense of the passage, as merely a prediction, like the saying of Cain, "Whoso findeth me shall slay me." Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days." "Every living thing that moveth shall be meat for you." "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein." These passages, and a multitude of others, show the usage of the Old Testament in regard to expressions precisely similar. They prove that the declaration has no necessary weight beyond a prediction; that it is properly and fairly a prediction concerning the usual course of events in the treatment of the most terrible of crimes. Commentators are by no means agreed as to the force of the passage. Professor Upham pronounces it the indefinite form of the Hebrew future; Professor Turner, a distinguished Hebrew scholar of the Episcopalian Church, says it may be permissive, but cannot be obligatory; and Professor Stuart declares it to be the most passive form which the language permits. The older annotators generally repeat the common view of the passage without any remarks. Their attention had not been called to any reasons for a different opinion; their court gave its judgment upon the hasty hearing of a single side: were they able to review their decisions, a large number would no doubt accord with the advanced humanity of our day. Le Clerc, however, understood the passage as we understand it, as a prediction of what would generally occur. Pascal quotes the Vulgate, "Whoso sheddeth human blood, his blood will be shed," not saying by whom; and adds, that this general prohibition. A very learned defence of capital punishment, by Professor Goodwin, of Bowdoin College, in the Bibliotheca Sacra for May last, admits that "the English translation, in this particular at least, furnishes just as good a basis on which to construct the meaning of the text as the original does." The particular is that which we are now considering. "The original language has no other form for either [the future or the imperative] and may therefore be understood here in either sense; and so may the English by which our translators have rendered it." - Bibliotheca Sacra, pp. 319, 320. takes away from man all authority over the life of man. Calvin also objects to the rendering "by man" (which is certainly not the necessary force of the Hebrew particle), and Olivet translates it "through man," giving it also a future sense. A favorite argument with the advocates of the present punishment is, that, "while the reason of a law stands, the law must stand." The converse of this must be equally true, and when the reason ceases for any enactment, it should be repealed. Now three distinct reasons existed for capital punishment in ancient time, which are just as much reasons against that particular punishment now. First, under the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations, Jehovah himself being the judge, the innocent could not be punished by mistake for the guilty. In every case of doubt and difficulty, the rulers of Israel sought and received Divine direction, sometimes by the Urim and Thummim, sometimes by the mysterious voice, sometimes through prophets and special messengers, sometimes by the supernatural punishment of the guilty; so that it was hardly possible for any mistake to be made. The chief reason which moved Lafayette to say he must protest against the penalty of death, because its administrators were so fallible, was not then in existence. The penalty could be affixed only where it was due. The decision rested, not upon an often deceptive combination of circumstances, but upon Him that readeth the heart and knoweth all things. With us, on the other hand, no one would believe, who had not studied the matter, how frequently mistakes have been committed, and the innocent sacrificed for the guilty. A parliamentary return, some time ago in England, showed, that, for many years, the average of the innocent executed for supposed guilt, whose sentence was reversed when it was too late, was one in three every But what numbers must have perished, protesting their innocence to the last breath, referring their misjudged cause to the only infallible tribunal, but having no friend powerful, wealthy, or zealous enough to care to do their memories justice! As the executed are commonly outcasts, bearing in their own body the only interested witness of their guiltlessness, thousands of such cases may astonish us in another world by an entire reversal of the sentence passed in this. Smollett's History relates one instance in which "the real criminals assisted at the execution of the innocent man, heard years. 1847.] Insanity. 361 his appeal to Heaven from the scaffold, and embraced him in the character of friends as he stood on the brink of eternity." In only one year, in France, seven cases occurred, in which persons condemned by the inferior courts were found innocent by the superior. Dymond, in his "Essays on the Principles of Morality," mentions six as having been hanged at one assize, and afterwards found to be innocent. O'Connell, in a speech at Exeter Hall, reported three such cases as occurring in a short space of time in his own practice. And, what is the worst of all, such mistakes are inevitable from the circumstantial evidence on which juries decide, and the unphilosophical views regarding insanity which still becloud all human tribunals of justice. Convictions are generally obtained through a combination of suspicious events, all fastening upon the accused as the guilty; and yet those appearances may be wholly deceptive, may be arranged by the real criminal to screen himself. O'Sullivan shows, in his masterly Report, how all such signs of guilt may fail entirely of proving it. We give the passage in an abridged form. - "There have been cases in which two old enemies have been seen fighting in a field, one found dead, killed by a pitchfork belonging to the other, and which that other had been carrying, and yet the real murderer has been afterward found on the jury that tried him. An innkeeper has been charged with the murder of a traveller,— one servant deposing to having seen his master on the stranger's bed, strangling and robbing him, — another swearing that he saw his master bury the gold in a particular spot, where the money was found, and where the master confessed he hid it he was hung, of course, though innocent. Violent language has been heard between a father and a daughter, the words "barbarity," "cruelty," "death," have been frequently heard from the latter, - - the former goes out, locking the door behind him,groans are overheard, the room is opened, and the daughter is found dying, and her gestures intimate that her father is the cause; he is executed, and before the year has passed, she is proved to have committed suicide." p. 119. Courts of law still fail of taking a just view of insanity in its connection with crime; juries are very unwilling to listen to evidence tending to an acquittal on this ground; and great numbers have, no doubt, perished on the scaffold for no other crime than a diseased mind. Drs. Ray, Brigham, and Woodward have been unwearied in pressing upon public attention the necessity of an entire reform in the criminal law regarding insanity. Dr. Brigham remarks in a letter recently published: "To my mind there is no stronger argument in favor of abolish ing capital punishments than the impossibility of deciding whether some homicides are insane or not. There is no sure criterion of insanity; no sure test of its existence, by which it may be certainly recognized. Bellingham, who was executed in London for killing Mr. Percival, was undoubtedly insane; and nu merous other cases in that country and on the Continent of Europe I could give you, if necessary, where persons have been executed for crimes committed under the sole influence of insanity. There are instances enough of the like kind in this country: Goss, in Connecticut, Cook, at Schenectady, Prescott, in New Hampshire, Baker, in Kentucky, occur to my memory; besides Cornell, condemned to be hung, but [who] had his sentence commuted by Governor Bouck to imprisonment for life at Auburn, where he now is an insane man; and Wilcox of Schenectady, likewise condemned to be hung, but [who] had his sentence com muted by Governor Wright, on the ground of insanity, and is now insane in Clinton prison." The Law Reporter for May closes an article, attributed to Dr. Ray, upon the "Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases," by stating that the law is now as far from being settled as ever." The doctrine now practically established was laid down by Coke and Hale at a time when insanity was not understood, and had hardly begun to be investigated. It was, that there must be a total privation of memory and understanding to protect a man from criminal responsibility. Mr. Justice Tracy, in 1783, laid it down as law, that the insane man "is totally deprived of his understanding and his memory, and doth not know what he is doing more than an infant, a brute, or a wild beast; such a one is never the object of punishment." Such an insane person, Dr. Bell well remarks, was never, probably, brought before a court, and never will be. Sir Vicary Gibbs, in 1810, laid down the principle of the English law thus: "I say this upon the authority of the first sages in this country, and upon the authority of the established law in all times, which law has never been questioned, that, although a man be incapable of conducting his own affairs, he may still be answerable for criminal acts, if he possess a mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong." And Lord Mansfield indorses this au |