We cannot better introduce what we have to say on the severity of punishments, and the alleged callousness of disposition in mediaeval times, and, indeed, on Mr. Lecky's whole criticism of the subject of eternal punishment, than by a passage from a most able writer:
"One of the effects of civilization (not to say one of the ingredients in it) is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain, is kept more and more out of sight of those classes who enjoy in their full the benefits of civilization. The state of perpetual personal conflict, rendered necessary by the circumstances of former times, and from which it was hardly possible for any person, in whatever rank of society, to be exempt, necessarily habituated everyone to the spectacle of harshness, rudeness, and violence, to the struggle of one indomitable will against another, and to the alternate suffering and infliction of pain. These things, consequently, were not as revolting even to the best and most actively benevolent men of former days, as they are to our own; and we find the recorded conduct of those men frequently such as would be universally considered very unfeeling in a person of our own day. They, however, thought less of the infliction of pain, because they thought less of pain altogether. When we read of actions of the Greeks and Romans, or of our own ancestors, denoting callousness to human suffering, we must not think that those who committed these actions were as cruel as we must become before we could do the like. The pain which they inflicted, they were in the habit of voluntarily undergoing from slight causes; it did not appear to them as great an evil as it appears, and as it really is, to us, nor did it in any way degrade their minds." [Footnote 27]
[Footnote 27: J.S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions; Art Civilization.]
The scale, in fact, according to which degrees of pain were computed, was much less minute then than now. This arose from the imperfect subdivision of labor in society, and the consequently more frequently recurring necessity of personally putting forth powers of endurance and of action; from the continual wars and commotions; from the imperfection of the mechanical appliances which now alleviate suffering; from a sterner and rougher manner of living, necessitated by the undeveloped state of the social arts; from the intimate intermingling of the civil and the military life, arising out of the feudal system; and from a multitude of other causes. To these, however, we must add another of far more potent influence. The inchoate mediaeval nations were only emerging from a state of barbarism; and the associations of that barbarism still tenaciously clung to them in the gloomy superstitions common among northern nations, in cruel ordeals, in internecine warfare, in the whole texture of their social and national traditions. The causes referred to by Mr. Mill were in operation almost as much in the civilization of Greece and Rome as in the middle ages; but this circumstance, which is one on which we need not dilate, increased, and must have increased, to an enormous extent the activity of the tendencies on which be remarks. If indeed, there were two nations exactly alike in every particular, except that the one believed eternal punishment and set small store by pain, so as severely and even barbarously to punish offenses, while the other did neither of these things--we should in that case plausibly assert a direct causal connexion between holding the eternity of future punishment and a hardness and callousness of temper. But we cannot argue in this free and easy manner, where the instances from which we have to make our induction are so multifariously different as are the social condition of the present day and the social condition of mediaeval times. We must not thus arbitrarily single one from out of a multitude of causes. Reasoning from the known principles of human nature, we can say with all confidence that the causes just enumerated must have operated, and operated very powerfully, to produce many and severe punishments, the carelessness for and of suffering, the trials by ordeal and by torture, which existed at the period of which we write. And thus we also see that those representations of the torments of the lost, on which Mr. Lecky expends such a vast amount of rhetoric, must have produced these effects immeasurably less than they would now produce; far more powerful means had to be resorted to then to produce an amount of feeling for which gentler methods now suffice.